Lauren Cardenas

“No Home for You Here/No hay hogar para ti” is a collection of work that explores the notion of loss and conflict by examining one’s hybrid identity – especially that of Latin Americans and how that has become defined by U.S. borders. In the politically divided, nationalist, and insular U. S., many blame the country’s problems on minorities. Multicultural individuals are prosecuted, threatened with deportation, refused amnesty, and racism, and their families are divided at the border, which is not the original tenet this country was built upon.

As an artist who struggles with a bifurcated Mexican American identity, I am constantly reminded of the privilege afforded to me: that I am a second-generation, white-passing Latina woman raised in the upper-middle class. I am well-educated and have an Ivy-Tower job, which is much more than I can say for most first and second-generation Latin Americans. Almost half of my extended family has not completed college, let alone a graduate degree. 

Being from Texas, the border has always been a tenuous territory. Yet, since 2016 the border situation has been pulled to the forefront of American Politics. Broadcasting the journey of Latinx refugees seeking the "American Dream,” yet instead of welcoming arms, they are being met by deportment, racism, and their families severed. Many were put on ICE Airplanes and given an American cheese sandwich, one of the most processed, commercialized, and symbolically "American" things in this country. In #SueñoAmericano Series, images of Latinx people and their flight views are printed on slices of Kraft Singles American Cheese to question the reality of the "American Dream," its false promises of acceptance and opportunity for all.

I used to be proud to be an American. But now, I am ashamed of my country's treatment of immigrants at the border as families are separated, and children are caged and dying. While I have experienced discrimination, it pales in comparison to what my parents experienced thirty-plus years ago. And my experience is nothing like that of today's asylum-seekers; my parents coached me to assimilate. Assimilation was the key to live an unencumbered life. Immigrants at our borders have been denied the opportunity to join the "American melting pot." The choice of assimilation is not even an offer. For them, the "American Dream" that was so kind to my parents is gone; instead, they are met by a living hell. The atrocities they face are met on social media by detached tweets about "thoughts and prayers." Which, in reality, do nothing, but alleviate the writer's sense of guilt. 

Green Curtain series is inspired by John Alexander’s Eye of the Storm. These photolithographs with rust are an abstract rendering of Kudzu, an invasive vine synonymous to the South East region of the United States. In this work, I attempt to incorporate both of Alexander’s political and naturalistic qualities into one piece. These prints elude to the seductive yet nefarious nature of Kudzu, as this luscious vine that devours and strangulates everything that comes in his path. I am reflecting on the concept that Kudzu has created a “green curtain” that attempts to shield the notorious conservatives that occupy the Southeast hemisphere of the U.S. from the atrocities that take place along the border. Kudzu acts as this sumptuous shield that literally binds us and extracts anything that doesn’t assimilate to its holdings.

Things You See in the Dark, a Parley Project created by the 2016-2018 Black Rock Press Redfield Fellow, Lauren Cardenas, is a collaboration with Daniel Enrique Perez, an Associate Professor of Chicanx and Latinx studies in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the University of Nevada, Reno and David Kirkland, a DJ based out of St. Louis, MO. The Parley Project is a biennial interdisciplinary book art project that fosters research and conversation across the UNR campus and involves BRP students, staff, and faculty in its production.

Things You See in the Dark is a visual, tactile, and auditory experience that pays homage to the uncertainties one might experience in the dark. Composed of a suite of prints and poems, along with the vinyl soundtrack, this artist book invites you, the viewer, to slow down while meditating on the elusive serene nature of the dark.

Lauren Cardenas’ “Borderline” explores the space of the bed as a distinctly feminine arena for rest, sex, illness and dreams. Using as her starting point historical works on paper from the Study Room for Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Cardenas selected from this collection a suite of images depicting women in bedrooms by a deep time-span of artists from Rembrandt to Renee Stout. These images serve as the dialogic counterpoint for her beverly exhibition, in which they reappear, fragmented and reimagined by Cardenas via contemporary print and digital media. Focusing on the peculiar intimacy of the bedroom — and how renderings of that space engage the viewer in both analogue and mediated forms of witnessing — “Borderline” assembles a community of women across time and space seeking solace in the private realms of their bodies and minds. Exhibition-viewers are invited to make an appointment at SLAM’s Study Room to view “Borderline’s” source imagery, and to further expand the dialogue between spaces, institutions and artifacts. 
 

This body of work is driven by the investigation of the domestic environment and the suggested intimacy found within. Using severe abstraction achieved through the manipulation of the photocopy machine, I explore the sublime that exists within the mundane of the everyday. This work asks viewers engagement of mental suspension, where the dualities of: under/above, inside/outside, light/dark have collapsed.

I employ the photocopy machine as a tool and exploit its immediacy, capturing ephemeral moments in a static picture plane. The photocopied image equalizes the subject by creating a starkly black and white composition. Repetitive scans enable a once flat picture plane to be distorted and obscure differences dictated by light and dark. The prints I create exhibit darkness as a dense configuration of light, existing as a form that is standing still.

This series of prints continues an investigation into physical perceptions of darkness as light, dismantling the notion that darkness is related to evil. Each print is the residue of memory, fused to a simple page of paper.