Alum Tatiana Parcero NYU/ICP'95 has a solo show Universus at jdc Fine Art, San Diego.
Tatiana Parcero’s Universus (Universes) series was created with funding from a three-year fellowship, FONCA (National Fund for Culture and the Arts), Mexico. The work debuted in 2014 at the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía, Mexico City. This is the first west-coast exhibition of the Universus works; two images from the Artist’s Fin y Principio (Beginning and End) series will also be included.
Tatiana Parcero explores the Body and its implicated connections to identity and the natural world. Parcero juxtaposes the human figure, which in nearly all the work is her own, and found imagery. Parcero’s work looks beyond the visible exterior. The layers she exposes are literal and symbolic; beautiful and charged. Just as it identifies so does it expound. In the end, we find an almost spiritual plane where there are no borders, beginnings, or endings, just connections and inclusions. It is we who draw the lines.
For Parcero the figure is more than flesh and bone; it is body and soul, earth and sea, identity and memory, intent and consciousness. Parcero’s early work, Cartografia Interior (Interior Cartografies), was literal. It revealed what was below the skin by integrating anatomy drawing and the figure. Nuevo Mundo (New World) engaged the figure as symbol for territory. If maps outline control and ownership, then colonial maps and codicies are super-charged images revealing of tresspasses. The Artist continued to employ mapping in Re-Invento (Reinvented); this series expanded her sphere and combined celestial maps and chemical constructions with the body. The macro and micro views underline atomic universality and position our consciousness accordingly. Together, all of these series establish alignments, prove relationships, and outline spheres of influence.
Repetition of Parcero’s own figure through different series affirms the singularity and plurality of human experience- one of many; all are one. The Body evolved as universal symbol, connected to and composed of everything. We are not above Nature; we are of it and of all things.
Fin y Principio shifts visually. It is clean, uses visual harmony, and known formal cues. The oval or vignette elevate common subjects (the egg, the stone, the bird, the field) into holey or spiritual ones. Hierarchy established, gestures work to inspire our meditation on the subtle shifts in the figure, and the works become station-like. In Universus Parcero continues to juxtapose the figure with naturalist-style images of flora and fauna. Some works in the Universus series are minimal landscape diptychs which relate to the approaches in Fin y Principio; fragmentation is a call for stewardship.
Parcero has developed the Body as a container of and symbol for The Universal. We see Parcero represent the Body as a Unit. The act of seeing these different implications associated with a single figure helps us understand our layered inter-connected present. Further, they establish responsibility. The Fin y Principioand Universus series inspire us to pause and appreciate if not reparate our relationships with each other and the natural world.
About the Artist:
Tatiana Parcero (b. 1967 Mexico) earned her Master of Arts in the fields of Art Theory and Photography from New York University and Bachelors Degree in Psychology from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in the USA, Mexico, Spain, France, Argentina, Brazil, Finland, and beyond. Parcero’s work is in such notable permanent collections as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Latin American Art.
Tatiana Parcero’s work will be included in Revolution & Ritual, an exhibition curated by Mary MacNaughton for Scripps’ contribution to the 2017 Pacific Standard Time.