New Light

“It’s like a little bit of Guadalajara. It’s beautiful; it’s fixed. It has this vintage feeling, and it’s always mysterious in a way.”

Challenging notions of gender and modernism, Guadalajara-born artist Claudia Cisneros’ La casa works subvert and transform rigidity into fluidity. In her Cruz roja performance, held opening weekend, Cisneros and local dancer Maggie Boyett literally moved the floor, picking up, carrying and trading off the dusty-red and light-gray tiles. The women performed an act of physical labor, re-creating the original space a mere few feet from it.

“You have this very structuralist space, very rigid space,” Cisneros says. “But then, these female bodies enter and they reconfigure everything. … This version of the piece is more intense. We do more physical labor, we share a lot of this tiredness, sweating and no concentration.”

Cruz roja is only one of Cisneros’ La casa que nos inventamos works. Economía del lenguaje, the base of the performance that will remain in the Creative Lounge through the duration of the exhibition, is another. The installation creates a stage with the same Guadalajara tiles, topped with newspaper flowers created by community members during workshops in Guadalajara or upstairs in our Learning Gallery, transforming these “harsh words” into something else entirely.

“When I made this installation, I always think we need to activate it at some point,” Cisneros says. “They are different pieces, but they also depend on each other. I like to do these things in my work, like people are. They are individuals, but there are always relationships and things are always affecting each other.”

Over the run of the exhibition, we’ll unveil new conversations about La casa, Guadalajara and cultivating creative communities. See an interview with Cisneros below, curator Viviana Kuri here and artist talks held opening weekend here. Or visit our entire La casa playlist on YouTube.

La casa que nos inventamos is on view through Jan. 9, 2023. Admission is always free.

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Guadalajara interview performance La casa que nos inventamos exhibition artist installation

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