Paloma Ayala
Artist Profile: Paloma Ayala
A Mexican Artist Explores Borders, Gendered Spaces, and Denver’s Changing Landscape During Her Residency at PlatteForum
Exhibition: Use The Space, Use It You Must
Opening March 5, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
PlatteForum, 2400 Curtis Street Suite 100, Denver, CO 80205
On view March 6-25, 2020
by Cori Anderson
Paloma Ayala did not realize that the headwaters of the Rio Grande River started in Colorado before she arrived here to fulfill a paid, month-long artist residency post at Denver’s PlatteForum arts nonprofit. And that fact is profoundly significant to her. In her most recent body of work, which focuses on the delta of the Rio Grande and the border towns of Brownsville and Matamoros, Ayala questions the existing violent narratives associated with that area through a meandering approach that mirrors the ever-evolving path of the river.
Paloma Ayala, Letters From Onion Island: A Fictional Epistolary Practice, 2019, black and white print on colored paper, 5.83 × 8.27 inches, created in Matamoros, Mexico and Brownsville, Texas. Image courtesy of the artist.
In one of her projects, Ayala writes a fictionalized letter exchange between herself and the Chicana activist and poet Gloria Anzaldúa called Letters from Onion Island. In another, Ayala musicalizes Anzaldúa’s poems as an interactive karaoke activity. In yet another, she paints cinder blocks a certain shade of green-blue in order to emphasize the immigration history of Matamoros.
Each of these is based on her experiences in Matamoros and Brownsville—two different cities, divided by the river and by so much more than that. “It is rather poetic that the actual border, the river, is so soft when the fences are so straight and hard,” she notes. Ayala grew up in Matamoros, and now half of her family lives on the U.S. side of the border while the other half remains in Mexico. “My family does not want to cross over to Matamoros anymore mainly because of the fear of violence,” she explained. “The younger ones do not go at all—they have completely separated themselves from that other identity.”
A river delta is an extremely fertile place, where a river carries sediment from hundreds of miles upstream and deposits it before meeting up with a larger body of water like an ocean. The Rio Grande Delta is a place of rich biodiversity. But when Ayala tried recollecting her experiences with such a magical ecological place from her upbringing, she couldn’t even remember the color of the water, or whether or not she had ever touched it.
“What color is it? I’m thinking about the images in my head and they are all mediated by the media—by screens, TVs, newscasters, descriptions from strangers. I crossed those bridges a thousand times or more in life, how can it be that I don’t remember a picture of the river?”
Paloma Ayala, Letters From Onion Island: A Fictional Epistolary Practice, 2019, black and white print on colored paper, 5.83 × 8.27 inches, created in Matamoros, Mexico and Brownsville, Texas. Image courtesy of the artist.
When she discovered the writings of Anzaldúa, Ayala was mesmerized by the Chicana activist’s experiences with the same place she found so fascinating, and how they differed as much as they aligned with hers. Anzaldúa grew up in Brownsville, writing poetry about the Rio Grande. “Even the name of the river is different,” Ayala noted. To the Mexican-born artist, it’s the Rio Bravo. She then explained how the two are similar, “the history of the pre-Columbian Mexican northeast is different than the one in the center or south of the actual territory… other Mexicans accuse us of not having culture, of speaking bad Spanish and being too dominated by the gringo culture. Segregating bullshit. And this is what connects me, us, to the Chicanx culture. This sense of not belonging completely to the central, dominating, national narrative.”
When Ayala returned to Matamoros with the mission to see and maybe touch the river, she suddenly realized why her view of it was so misshapen. “There’s a sense of living in a war zone, of being afraid, but now there’s also this sense of urgency and suspicion. Suspicion that separates and damages the social tissue,” she said. It’s a social tissue that extends far beyond just crossing the river. It extends to the survival of people who live on the land—farmers, fishers, and women who want to wash clothes and bathe children.
“I then understood I’m thinking about this huge narrative of the border that has to do with violence, guns, drugs, and it’s basically overpowering or colonizing the many different understandings this river has and used to have. I think to myself: how am I going to create access to this river?”
Ten years ago, Ayala moved to Zurich, Switzerland and has continued to live there since, with the ability to make a living as a full-time artist. But the magnetism that the river delta and border towns have over Ayala keeps her returning over and over again, probing for more. There is something about the “emotional residue” (as Anzaldúa called it) of the area, and Ayala wants to explore the possibilities of reframing the narrative in order to create new access both physically and mentally to the river and its surrounding ecologies.
Paloma Ayala, MONUMENT, 2019, mixed media installation with cinder blocks, paint, textiles, and audio. Image courtesy of the artist.
All of this, and much more of Ayala’s artistic oeuvre, starts with a feminist appeal. She not only tackles feminist ideas and issues in her work, but she also allows her feminist beliefs to guide how she makes her work. In MONUMENT, for example, Ayala recorded voices from other women that deconstructed the typical historical narrative of the place and constructed an actual gathering place of cinder blocks decorated with handmade quilts and crocheted throws. Imagine if history was re-written from a female’s perspective, and that’s a good place to start to understand Ayala’s sagaciousness.
“[Feminism] is a cornerstone that allows me to be critical of what happens in the different environments where I work,” Ayala commented. “Feminism even gives space to be critical of feminism itself. I am suspicious, for example, of non-intersectional, mostly white, high-middle class, cis, colonial, female perspectives.”
Paloma Ayala, USE THE SPACE. USE IT, YOU MUST: Sex, Space, and Imagination, 2018, laser color print, 17 x 11 inches, created in New Delhi. Image courtesy of the artist.
In 2018, Ayala went to India and spent several months moving through what she came to call gendered spaces, culminating in her staying at a female dormitory and co-creating a fictional fanzine about the experience called Use This Space, Use It You Must. Ayala writes and designs fanzines for all of her exhibits and installations as a way to further explore the topic and give viewers more to bite into, philosophically speaking. In Use This Space, Use It You Must, the central thesis revolves around the construction of “spaces where sex is determined and contained” and how women move through, live, survive, and sometimes overcome such spaces.
During her residency at PlatteForum, Ayala will create an installation inspired by her research in the river delta and border towns while also working with PlatteForum’s ArtLab interns to create a set of fanzines about gendered spaces in Denver using art, writing, poetry, interviews, and other submissions from the surrounding community. “The question that I ask myself often is: How do we inhabit spaces and how do spaces inhabit us?” Ayala mentioned.
That question is at the heart of all of Ayala’s work. The environment she observes—whether it is the delta of a major North American river or a dormitory in India or a changing neighborhood in Denver—informs the emotional tapestry of whatever communities inhabit and use it. “Here in Denver, ‘inhabiting’ would be really important to talk about it you think of a city where accesses to economic security and affordable housing are limited, unequal,” Ayala hypothesized, accurately naming one of the most contentious issues in the city.
Paloma Ayala, USE THE SPACE. USE IT, YOU MUST: Sex, Space, and Imagination, 2018, laser color print, 17 x 11 inches, created in New Delhi. Image courtesy of the artist.
Her process for making art relies on her ability to empathize with underrepresented perspectives and use them to recontextualize harmful societal norms, like violence and colonization. And even though her list of exhibitions and installations stretches back for years, it feels like each one is as relevant or maybe even more so than when she first created it. Take, for instance, the Fictitious News series she started in 2015 that is the artistic version of our current crisis of “fake news.”
But what stands out most in Ayala’s art is the unmistakable ability she possesses to reveal what has traditionally been overlooked or even sometimes obscured from the public eye. Her work is always a platform for urgent issues; her voice amplifies other voices that have rarely been listened to before; and her interpretations allow for reinvigorated perspectives about desensitized issues. It is no wonder that she was chosen for this year’s residency at PlatteForum, a place that seeks to uplift the underserved.
“One thing about creating accesses,” Ayala explained,”is that you start making bridges to spaces and peoples that have been made invisible up to this point.”
To see Ayala’s work: You can attend the opening reception of Paloma Ayala’s exhibition Use The Space, Use It You Must inside PlatteForum’s gallery on March 5, 2020 starting at 6 p.m. Her residency will end on the same day, but the exhibit runs through March 25. You can also visit her website at www.palomaayala.com for photos and descriptions of previous exhibitions and bodies of work.
For the last four years, Cori Anderson has written about art and culture for publications around Denver such as 303 Magazine, Westword, and 5280. While much of her focus has been geared toward creating more accessibility to art from the streets to the gallery, she writes for DARIA with a renewed motivation of catering to an art-loving audience. Cori's heavy focus on street art has resulted in the formation of her own business, The Street Art Network, which curates murals across the city and county of Denver. But her passion and curiosity range from the classics to the contemporaries in all mediums of artistic expression.
