“Like the mutability of social strictures in my lost and new homelands, my work embraces ambiguity and uncertainty,” Tatiana Garmendia writes about her portfolio Migrations. Garmendia’s work “wrestles with conflicting moral intuitions, with the personal and the historic.” Whether the medium is writing, painting, or even dance, the creative mind is driven to tell our […]
Before my eyes open, I begin my day by searching for my phone. My hand runs over the covers, under the pillow, along the stack of books on my bedside table. More often than not, I find it and am plunged into the rush of notifications, which I absorb with one eye closed, because of my astigmatism. But some mornings my phone has fallen between the bed and the wall. The first time this happened I tried to carry on with my morning, feed the cats, pee, but a feeling kept sounding the alarm that I had forgotten something. I paced the apartment, into the kitchen, back into the bedroom, the bathroom. My husband was sleeping and to retrieve my phone from between the bed and the wall would be to wake him. Which is precisely what I found myself doing. And before the sun was up we were moving the mattress, so I could snatch that which brings me, joy.
The following narrative should be read alongside Tatiana Garmendia’s artist portfolio Migrations. The doilies function as surrogates for the domestic domain. Their fragility contrasts starkly with brutal memories of the night the G2 Cuban secret police took my father away for a two-year interrogation. Mounted on drone footage from a random suburban Washington neighborhood, they point to the intrusion […]
Girl’s Dresser is not my first attempt at using watercolor, though it’s among the earliest ones on my long journey to becoming an artist. This piece was created in 1991 after I had turned sixteen. The start of the year was one of my most dramatic teenage years. Second only to the year I became pregnant […]
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