Becoming Sticky: Equatorial Visions from Central America
Tesora Garcia, Lorena Molina, and Martín Wannam
Main Gallery
On view: January 17 – April 11, 2025
Becoming Sticky: Equatorial Visions from Central America is a three-person show featuring Central American artists in conversation, using expansive lens-based imagery and sculpture to consider political strategies of “looking from the middle”—i.e. what it’s like to make work from and inspired by a tropical region. The exhibition focuses on approaches with “equatorial vision,” which means alerting audiences to how tropical weather—humidity, volcanic heat, rain, lush flora—affects the practices behind Tesora Garcia, Lorena Molina, and Martín Wannam.
What would it mean to make photographs that sweat? Can cameras erupt? How are bodies and land observed (made into an image) outside of the dominance of Western perspectival space and Vitruvian perfection?
Recent scholarship in atmospheric philosophy over the past three decades has opened up a radically new perspective on the mutual construction of human perception and atmospheric elements. Originally a meteorological concept developed in environmental sciences, atmospheres have gained traction primarily in the fields of aesthetic theory, urban planning, and architectural design, as thinkers have gained greater awareness of the effects of ambience (sensual elements of ecosystems) on human moods and sense perceptions. Many of these studies, however, originate from Eurocentric models of philosophy; German, Francophone, and Anglophone research dominates the inventory of available scholarship. Such a myopia ignores the blatant femininity of the weather, its queerness, and magico-political character; atmospheres are feelings that “hang in the air” and produce magic (i.e. emotions), which in turn produce politics (i.e. relationships of power and governance).
This exhibition will include photography, sculpture, video, and plants to explore Equatorial Vision in relation to the ongoing trauma of climate change, venture capitalism in the Global South, migrations, and the corporate and imperial takeover of Mesoamerican territory.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Tesora Garcia (she/her) [born 1989] is a Salvadoran-American media artist, writer, and educator. A citizen of the Global South and an American Dreamer, J’s research engages mystical and esoteric traditions of ancient Mesoamerica, South(east) Asia, and Pan African spirituality. Her aesthetic output takes on an epic scale, creating immersive physical and psychic environments that use lens-based and time-based technologies to transport viewers into non-physical realms. Through heavy-handed alteration of photographic imagery, darkroom experiments, and performance projects that center her body as a transwoman, she elicits visionary experiences and emancipatory phenomena.
Tesora holds an MFA degree in Photography+Extended Media from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and graduated with dual degrees in Photography and Art History from the University of North Texas. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Futures at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.
Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Practice at San Francisco State University. She’s also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supports and highlights BIPOC artists.
Through the use of photography, video, performance and installation, she explores identity, intimacy, pain, and how we witness the suffering of others. The work interrogates relationships and the formation of relationships as political acts that are guided by negotiations of power and privilege.
At the core of her work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges that oppressed groups face in constructing place and establishing a sense of belonging. The work is driven by a deep sense of displacement experienced after a 12-year-old civil war forced her and her family to migrate to the United States. Most of her work stems from a need to find and build community in a way that it’s both tender, accountable, challenging through difficult conversations that makes everybody involved actively question their position and privileges in society.
Her current work looks at identity in the margins. She views the margins both as a place where extreme violence and pain happens, but also as a place for resisting, dreaming, healing, and thriving.
She received her Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Minnesota in 2015 and her Bachelor of Fine Art from California State University, Fullerton, in 2012. Molina has been a recipient of the Diversity of Views and Experiences fellowship, The Christopher Cardozo Fellowship, (Two) Truth and Reconciliation grant from Artswave, The Idea Fund, and The Kala Art Institute fellowship. She has exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally, such as the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, The Kemper Museum, Southeast Museum of Photography, 621 Gallery, The Carnegie, Covington, KY, Vox Populi, FSU Museum of Fine Arts, EXPO Chicago, The Armory, The Delaplaine Art Center, The Beijing Film Academy and all over the piazzas of Florence, Italy.
In the classroom, she works with students to understand the way that images are laden with history and vocabulary. Images tell stories, but who gets to tell the story matters.
Martín Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) is a visual artist and educator whose work critically examines Guatemalan's historical, social, and political climate, focusing on freedom dreaming for the cuir individual. He focuses on the intersection of brownness and cuir utopia that uses the foundation of iconoclasm and the aesthetic of maximalism through the tools of photography, sculpture, and performance for the constant evaluation of systematic structures such as religion, coloniality, folklore, and white supremacy.
He received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in Spring 2020, a Diploma in Contemporary photography from La Fototeca (GT) in 2016, and their BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar (GT) in 2015. Wannam has exhibited nationally and internationally, including various group and solo shows in Guatemala, The United States, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Korea. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of the Fronteristxs Collective, a collective of artist fighting for migrant justice and the abolition of the prison industrial complex.