SHAPESHIFTER DRAWINGS
Irenic Projects
Pasadena, California
March - July 2020
 Curated by Mike Hernandez
Shapeshifters is a set of eight large shellac ink drawings on handmade Kozo Washi paper.
I began them during a residency in November 2019 at the Ucross Foundation, on the edge of the Great Plains. At seven, I and my family had moved to a small town on the Plains.  I returned to this part of the West to reconcile the raging present with haunts in this labyrinthine country of mesas and sky. Terrain led me to the prolific writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695). She wrote twenty satirical ‘Enigma’ poems in response to a clutch of ills in New Spain, including the indifference to the suffering of the poor among the elite of colonial New Spain. She died while ministering to the sick on the streets of Mexico City during an outbreak of cholera. 
Sor Juana shears dread, wonder, nature, faith and passion into terse rhyme. Contentious, paradoxical and perverse, her writing grapples with the tension between language and community. She presides over this strange new world where fear of contagion gives agency to non-truths. 
Like the Enigmas, the Shapeshifter drawings aim to embody ‘the delight’ and the ‘hellish plight’ in their shimmering, seductive and snaring traps.
​Thanks to translator Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (2015)
​
¿Cuál puede ser el contento
que con hipócrita acción
por sendas de recreación
va caminando al tormento?
~
What can be the delight
that with hypocritical gesture
along pathways of leisure
goes trekking toward a hellish plight?
​
Link to full text PDF from Ugly Duckling Press