Archives + Futures: Materials

with Victoria Martinez and Melissa Leandro


A+F is proud to partner with ACRE to present our second conversation with incredible Latinx artists Victoria Martinez and Melissa Leandro!!!!! Learn about their relationship to MATERIALS in their own practice, how they arrived at their specific understanding of them and how their background and history got them to where they are now. Audience questions and participation are encouraged!

Archives + Futures (A+F) is a podcast series developed by Ivan Lozano and Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez. Currently in its “pilot season,” A+F is generating an archive of interviews and conversations (to be archived online) for current and future visual artists to connect to the personal practices and cultural histories, cannons, heroes and ancestors of their fellow Latinx and Indigenous artists of the Americas.
 

Event Details:

ACRE Projects
2439 S Oakley Ave
Chicago , IL 60608

Wheelchair Accessible

Victoria Martinez

Victoria Martinez is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who explores textiles, installation art, site-specific experiments, printmaking, and painting. She believes in chance and intuition, creating ephemeral experiences inspired by the urban environment, Mother Earth, and fabric, a universal material that connects us all despite of our background. 

Melissa Leandro

Melissa Leandro is an artist who works between the media of drawing, painting, and textiles. Leandro's woven and embroidered surfaces explore her composite cultural identity through means of intuitive mark-making. Reflecting on her past and present travels, she considers the impact of these environments on the fragmentation of identity and place.

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez works interrogate the slippage between time and the act of image creation. His projects examine political optics as applied to the human body in social contradictions, and through photography and cinema in their accorded roles in recording history and representing society to itself.

Recent work has been presented in exhibitions at Galeria Gabriela Mistral, Santiago, Chile; Alice Gallery, Seattle; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; MAMA Annex, Los Angeles, and a solo exhibition at the Windor Contemporáneo in Madrid. He has studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, received a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an M.F.A from the University of Pennsylvania and participated in the the Program for Advanced Studies in Critical Practices at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. He has received awards supporting his work from PennDesign and City of Chicago - Department of Cultural Affairs.

Ivan Lozano

Ivan Lozano (b. Guadalajara, Mexico) lives and works in Chicago, where NewCity Art recognized him as a “Breakout Artist” in 2014. He received a MFA from SAIC in 2011. LOZANO was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film festival, co-founder of a feminist video collective (Austin Video Bee), a net art blog (CTRL+W33D), and founder of an ad-hoc digital press (IMAGE FILE PRESS) and Latinx/Indigenous artist podcast series (ARCHIVES + FUTURES). His work has been exhibited at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center (Chicago, IL), the Leslie-Lohman Museum for Gay and Lesbian Art (NYC), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago, IL), the Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), The Hyde Park Arts Center (Chicago, IL), Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL), the Texas Biennial (09 and 13), FotoFest’s Talent in Texas series (Houston, TX), and many others.