We were very delighted to catch multifaceted Winnipeg-based artist Mariana Muñoz Gomez at her studio amid her tight schedule and deadlines inching closer. Gomez was in the middle of gathering and selecting work as part of a forthcoming group exhibition. The current collected work sees Gomez employing a wide array of media including printmaking, video and elements of sculpture to process and think through ideas of otherness, marginalization,language, and duality of identities. In our below chat with Gomez, she shows us around her studio, the pieces of work lying around her studio she's accumulated over the past year, and what she has been discovering about her own work.
[Gomez had been previously working on a book project that documents her interviews around experiences of immigrants in Canada.]
Public Parking: Tell me how you transitioned from the book format for the interviews into the video
Mariana Muñoz Gomez: Part of the reason was just because of time, I would have to have the books ready by a certain date, and then order them and wait for them to come in. But I'm still thinking about having the interviews as a book format for a future project. The video also allowed for the text fade in and out of each translation, which fits with what I've been thinking about on bilingualism.
PP: Is it multiple individual stories fading in and out of each other?
MMG: Yeah, it has selected text from each interview, so it's one person's story and then later its another person's story. I interviewed four different people who are immigrants to Canada. I mostly talked to people who were between 20 to mid 30s and they all came to Canada at different points in their lives. I started off asking them mostly about memories, or the immigration process, and just anything else they wanted to talk about.
Within the video, each interview gets translated back and forth between English and that person's first language. Then I kept translating back and forth up until the changes that came out of Google translate plateaued.
Gallery Install
Detail of Video work
"It's maybe kind of meaningful how Google can or can't handle different languages. I think it speaks to who uses Google, who has access to it, who is adding corrections to translations on Google."
PP: how was that like using google translator...in terms of having that be the thing that lets people know what's being said.
MMG: I chose Google translate because it's a quick and easy thing a lot of people go to to look up phrases here and there. But it in a way degrades the language more so in some cases than others. For the interview with one of my friends who is from India, I was translating into Punjabi, and when I translated back into English the first time it had already changed a lot. It does a pretty ok job with a language like Spanish...there are some differences between translations but it’s not as drastic as with Punjabi. One day when I was thinking of what I could do with this project, I just started playing with Google translate, I had already been thinking about language for a long time, and I thought this degradation was interesting so I started to incorporate it into the work. It's maybe kind of meaningful how Google can or can't handle different languages. I think it speaks to who uses Google, who has access to it, who is adding corrections to translations on Google.
PP: Oh that’s really true...i definitely see that. It definitely adds another dimension to what you are going for
MMG: Yes, I think it does. It’s the background for a lot of the work.
PP: How did you get interested this area of research?
MMG: I’m an immigrant too, we moved here when I was three years old and obviously there are different experiences for everyone. If you moved here say as a pre-teen or as an adult, you'll have different experiences and opinions about your home country. More or less built-up memories and ties, and even very different connections to your first language. It's just something I think about a lot and something that I’ve thought about more critically about in the past few years.
Gomez's Studio
PP: How did the interviewing come in?
MMG: A lot of times when I start making work, I just jump into it naturally and see what works. Interviewing seemed like an option I could try out to start with. Originally I was thinking about making books out of these interviews, have the interviews professionally translated so they'd be correct, and I was thinking about embroidering on the English side, the intention being to challenge the narrative of marginalization in Western society and to other the English reader.
"I feel like when you are an immigrant as opposed to just moving to a different city or something in the same country there’s kind of a sense of finality; you know that you’ll only see the people you left behind so many more times in your life."
PP: How did you approach people?
MMG: I mostly asked people who I already knew, who are immigrants. When I started the interviews I was thinking about making the book, so I introduced them to the book idea. I had some set questions I wanted to ask them. At the beginning, I was asking for visual descriptions of their home but I'd also let them talk about whatever else came up. With the first two people I interviewed, it turned out that both of them had moved to Canada close to their birthday. A couple other people that I spoke to talked about a shift in identity and kind of leaving part of you behind. Someone else I interviewed talked about how when she went back to visit her hometown in Peru for the first time after having been here for like seven years, she realized it was a totally different context. I feel like when you are an immigrant as opposed to just moving to a different city or something in the same country there’s kind of a sense of finality; you know that you’ll only see the people you left behind so many more times in your life.
PP: And those where things you related to...even though you came here much younger
MMG: Yeah, maybe I can’t completely relate to the sense you leaving part of yourself behind because I was very young when I moved and it was my parents’ choice to move here, but I think I can understand it. Sometimes I think about how it would be like if I had grown up in Mexico, and I think a lot about only seeing my family there every few years. In my case, I’ve been pretty lucky - we’ve been able to visit almost every three years for a chunk of years, and we're going again this year. Some of the people I’ve talked to have had 7 or 10 year gaps between visits with family, or can't or don't want to go back to their home country. And that's probably something that a lot of people who aren’t immigrants don't think about.
Gallery install
PP: Can you talk about your screenprints on crumpled up newsprints pile?
MMG: There are 2 or 3 different images of myself on the newsprint from another project I did a couple of years ago. So, when you screen print, first you do a test print on a piece of cheap newsprint. The test print ends up going in the garbage or recycled and it's something you don't really need anymore. When I was doing this with these images a couple of years ago, I did a test print and tossed it aside and I kind of liked the shape of it crumpled up against the wall. For this work, I was thinking a lot about self-marginalization and internalized rejection as a person of colour in white Western society. I also used the process of cmyk printing in this work and in other works, thinking about it as a way to literally break apart or build up an identity when I've worked with portraits. Cmyk printing is a way of screen printing photo realistic images by breaking an image up into layers of colour: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So if I had printed the cmyk layers correctly, the images would look more realistic. Shifting them and moving them around totally separates the image up.
Gallery install
PP: Where do you think the sense of otherness generates from?
MMG: I think it’s kind of gradual. At least it was for me. When I was younger I didn’t really know how to place it or have a word for it. But as I've grown up and engaged with writing and discourse around these topics, I think I’ve been more aware of myself in that way, like weird or uncomfortable memories fall into place. There’s another piece in the show that started out as me sort of interviewing myself like I interviewed people for the video, and the idea is still there but it got edited into a more poetic format, and it talks about that gradual realization. There are examples from being in elementary school and something pointing to me as different, to more blunt things in my adulthood.
PP: Tell me about your use of acetate with the paper in some of your pieces
MMG: The format came about by just testing and playing around with different things. The materials connect to technical aspects of screen printing again, like with the pile. I ended up printing on acetate and paper because, like the video work, it kind of played around with the intermingling of languages—in my case English and Spanish. With this series of works, parts of the English are clearer and other parts not so much, and same with the Spanish. But overall the whole thing is easier to read if you can read Spanish, I think.
PP: How do you sit with this intermingling dual identity that is part of you?
MMG: It’s something I want to research and learn more about. One of my friends lent me their psychology textbook with a chapter on people who are bilingual and the duality of this identity. I’ve been thinking about language for years, and there was a point where I did speak Spanish at home and I’m not quite sure when that stopped. I read this article, "The Strange Persistence of First Languages" by linguist Julie Sedivy, where she talks about how language is very closely tied to identity and how people who can speak multiple languages can access different memories if they think in a different language or speak in a different language. In the article she talked about how she moved to Canada from the Czech Republic when she was very young, and she ended up in Montreal. Like many immigrant kids, I'm sure, she kind of abandoned or lost her first language, and grew up feeling a bit disconnected from her parents. They mostly spoke Czech, and Sedivy talks about how this disconnect affected her and her family towards the end of her dad's life.
PP: Are you still interested in making this into a book?
MMG: Yeah, I would definitely like to see this made into a book format and be able to be flipped through. I like the idea of a book because it can be more intimate.
PP:Speak a bit about your Plexiglas pieces which you melted and warped in into irregular shapes. can you also talk where they situate into the body of work...why you selected that material...and why you chose to treat and modify it the way we did...how you wanted them presented...
MMG: The Plexiglas in the pile of prints is a mirror plexi material. I wanted to warp it to mimic the shape of the crumpled newsprint that makes up the rest of the pile. I wanted to prompt the viewer to ask themselves if they could see themselves in my work, if they could relate. A mirror is a pretty direct way of doing that. A side effect of the pleximirror is that it fogged up unpredictably when I heated it to warp it. I think it was the quick temperature change when I took it out of the kiln to bend it. The resulting foggy material that is still partially reflective further challenges the question of who can relate to the work.
In the pile there is also a crumpled test print of text included in the paper and acetate works, which I've called Prototypes for Understanding. The text is a short piece of writing in my first language relating to several experiences in which I have realized myself as another (to white Western society), at the hands of white Western society.
Gomez's Studio
PP: Also, I’m curious about your use of masking tape in presenting some of your pieces you hung up as part of the show...can you talk a bit about that and also as part of your other pieces (not part of the final show), you had some of your pieces hung low to the ground...what were some of the decisions behind the way you chose to present them.
MMG: Including the tape as part of the paper and acetate works was for function as well as to suggest an in-progress mentality. Since the hanging of the work is almost invisible with just two straight pins holding up each piece, the tape is all that holds together the paper and acetate in most cases.
This work also ties into a technical reference to screen-printing: the act of printing on acetate before printing on paper to properly register your layers. The provisionally of material and the informal presentation suggest that the work itself is in progress, and while this is probably clearer to those who are familiar with screen-printing, I think it still gets across. I think that this together with the title suggests that my own experience, awareness, and thinking related to topics that come up in the work are in progress as well.
Gomez's Studio
PP: What kind of work and themes have you been interested in the past?
MMG: I used to do more work about coming of age, the everyday, and I've thought about place and feminism with my art, too. I've mostly done printmaking, but I've played around with photography for a while and I really like it. I like being in the darkroom for some reason, which is part of both screen printing and photography. I remember seeing Lorna Simpson's and Ellen Gallagher’s work at the Walker in first year and those two artists' work just stayed in my head. Recently I’ve been more interested in making work about language, assimilation, marginalization, and coming of age.
PP: What kind of kid were you growing up?
MMG: I always liked crafts and making drawings and things. I remember in grade two we had to keep this moon journal and my teacher asked to keep my mine as an example because it had drawings that I worked really hard on. In high school I was part of the gifted learners math and science programs. Calculus was fun. I only took art in grade twelve... going into university I wasn't sure at all about what I wanted to do, but I thought I'd go into engineering or architecture or something. I really got more into art as I started university.