HOME / 2011 Art X Detroit / Sioux Trujillo

Sioux Trujillo

 

Title: memory, loss and labor

Medium: Felt, thread

Year Created: 2011

In my current body of work I’m working with industrial felt and thread because for me fabric holds a collective memory and I see it as a metaphor for the human condition in a post-industrial city like Detroit. During the past 3 years I have worked with the concepts of hybridity of the artist in the 21st century and explored the labor of object making to develop my personal visual language. I focused on the deconstruction of memory and the meaning of loss, mourning and labor. Subtlety and Nuance are very important to my work because of the way I think the brain “sees” what is not there. My pieces are hand sewn allowing me to embed spiritual value in every piece. This allows the viewer to experience the seductive, low tech, haptic nature of my sculpture at a pre-industrial pace.

This idea of labor is explored on multiple levels in my work: The labor of the artist creating the piece through repetition and obsessive construction, the labor that goes into the manufacturing of the raw materials, the materiality of the felt and the way it carries the human imprint and the sociological role of labor in a contemporary context I believe that viewing works of art should call for attention and patience, as they push the bodily act of consumption into the mental act of contemplation.

Visual art does not unfold in history like a film or a book: It exists all at once. Having no rate of consumption, it throws the viewer back to her own rhythms (or lack thereof), while the act of viewing gives no outward sign of comparison.