Creating Platforms for Community + Artists

Sanitary Tortilla Factory
401-403 2nd St SW
Albuquerque, NM 87102

(505) 228-3749
stfsubmissions@gmail.com

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Approved by God – Tanner Slick

Image credit: Tanner Slick, Small Prick Carries Heavy Load

Approved by God
Tanner Slick
MAY 7-29, 2021

Reception: Friday, May 7,  5-7pm

Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents new works by UNMs College of Fine Art MFA candidate TANNER SLICK. The ambitious, mixed media exhibition, Approved by God the artist blurs boundaries between object/body, pleasure/pain. Binary conditions and beliefs are transformed to complex intersections. The works range from small cast bronze representational distortions of bodies to transporting large-scale installations carefully crafted from scavenged materials. Each piece begins with improvisation and ends in articulated detail. The use of any material necessary approach to sculpting the world they know as a queer, masculine transsexual, southern (anti)belle.

 

APPROVED BY GOD was the phrase found on a hand painted sign strapped to the basket of a dirty, broken and clearly beloved trike at the Esperanza community bike shop in Albuquerque a few years ago. That trike became the frame for a collaborative mobile sound-cart that Tanner was working on at the time. The statement was as fitting for that beautiful piece of junk as anything else on this earth. If God is the creator of all things, then isn’t everything pre-approved?

Tanner Slick is a sculptor, scavenger and social-practice artist from Atlanta, GA, who is living in Albuquerque. Their art takes form in hand-crafted objects, installations, public interventions, audio/video and community spaces. Often working with reclaimed materials and cultural symbolism, they transform normative ideas of gender, power, sex and violence. From gnarled wood and rusty metal to glam, queer, kink aesthetics, they fuse a non-binary and trans experience with the lawless complexities of the natural, non-human world. 

Slick also has a long-standing practice of community-building through collective living, farming/gardening and education projects. Since May of 2020 they have been collaboratively rehabilitating a two-story house on farmland into a shared living, growing and creative space in Albuquerque, NM. Slick received their BA from Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA in 2008 and is expecting to receive their MFA from the University of New Mexico in the spring of 2021.

Tanner Slick is the recipient of Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s 2021 Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) award. The EVAS series offers professional space for Master of Fine Art graduate students per year as their final thesis show. The culminating exhibition launches them into their profession as an artist. With the series, we underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s innovative connection to contemporary art practices.

ACROSS THE ROOM FROM EACH OTHER hazel batrezchavez + mk

 

MK, “The Inside of the Casket”.

Across The Room From Each Other, a collaborative performance and exhibition with hazel batrezchavez and mk acting within a collective space interweaving ongoing conversations of family and practices of personal and public memorial over the duration of 6 weeks. Please check back for dates for performances, exhibitions openings for each phase. 

 

PHASE ONE (October 2 – 23), hazel batrezchavez considers the layers of systematic oppression related to silencing and policing of individuals both at the border and on the stolen land we currently occupy. BLINDFOLDED UNDER THE SAME SUN moves freely between poetry, textiles, sound-video installation, and large-scale sculpture. It is grounded in batrezchavez’s familial history of migration from El Salvador/ Mexico and the inter-generational experiences they have shared when it comes to resistance, isolation, and survival.  

BANNER on north side of STF is a temporary installment affiliated with the work of hazel batrezchavez. The artist is a participant of a coalition of artists, fronteristxs. As part of the movement for abolition and to divest public pension funds from private prisons, fronteristxs will install a wall-size message in downtown Albuquerque on Oct 2nd at 10AM. Watch live on Instagram and Facebook: @fronteristxs

https://fronteristxs.site

Follow #NMERBdivest, a project of the Prison Divest New Mexico Coalition

 

PHASE TWO (October 26 – November 6), hazel batrezchavez and mk perform their collaborative piece Across The Room From Each Other, over the duration of four days, they will acknowledge their own perspective journeys, and collective memories regarding familial histories. 

PHASE THREE (November 9 – 28), mk investigates coping mechanisms through the function of photographic memory within the last remaining family archives in their immediate family. You’ll miss me when I’m gone, calls attention to their uprooted deep southern upbringing in relation to the practices of memorial, forgiveness and celebration while addressing their personal and public relationships with family

hazel batrezchavez and MK received Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award in 2020. The Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) series offers professional space for two Master of Fine Art graduate students per year as their final thesis show. The culminating exhibition launches them into their profession as an artist. With the series, we underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s innovative contemporary art scene.


hazel batrezchavez received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Studio Art and Anthropology from Grinnell College in 2017 and her MFA in Sculpture at the University of New Mexico in 2020. Since then she has been a part of various group exhibitions and pop-up shows in the United States, specifically in California, New Mexico, Iowa, and most recently México City, and Michoacán, México. batrezchavez is a recipient of the Center of Fine Arts, Dean’s Travel Grant Award, MaryAnn Evans Grant and of both the Lucile Lattanner Reid Brock and the Betty Sabo Scholarship. At the moment batrezchavez is partnering with the Santa Fe Dreamers Project as part of her StoryMaps Fellowship at the Santa Fe Arts Institute (SFAI) to create a collaborative project, that centers the voices of humans that have been forced to migrate from their homelands. As she continues to prepare for a performance at the border ports of entry in El Paso and Brownsville, Texas following her own families migration.

 

MK (Monica Kennedy) is an artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2017, they received their BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston and are currently attending the University of New Mexico for their MFA in Photography. They are originally from a small rural town by the name of Sulligent, Alabama, and this place has become a driving force for the mass majority of their work.

Using found items, stories, and the longing to be back with their family in this small town. They work in a variety of mediums ranging from photography, printmaking and sculpture in order to pursue and question their upbringing, identity, family, and the terms of loss and memory. They have shown at institutions such as the Blaffer Art Museum, The National Hispanic Cultural Center and SITE Santa Fe.

“Waiting Room Poem” by hazel batrezchavez

We proudly present a limited online stream of “Waiting Room Poem” by hazel batrezchavez. The stream will only be available May  04-  May 18, 2020.

In the Waiting Room by hazel batrezchavez

View Here

“my grandmother is here tonight
she writes like this
highlighter on lineless paper
bible verses
she pins them onto her mirror
so her survival tactics are reflected back at me
In The Waiting Room
where i am standing just as i am here now
Alone
surrounded by whiteness to my right and left
i don’t run here anymore, because there is no where to go ”

– excerpt from In the Waiting Room Poem by hazel batrezchavez

In the Waiting Room, is an exhibition that bears witness to the places where
individuals are asked to perform their identity, in highlighting the microaggressions
faced by someone who is racialized in crossing borders, inverting practices of authority
and focusing on the historical violence of language. In the Waiting Room, draws
parallels between the southern border and the institution as systems of oppression that
take up space and silence certain humans. The work is built as a reaction to the
current cultural landscape the artist navigates and moves freely between the written word,
large scale sculpture, textiles, performance, and video installation.

Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award Recipients

Congratulations to University of New Mexico MFA Candidate’s Hazel Batrezchavez and Monica Kennedy on receiving Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award! The Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) series offers professional space for two Master of Fine Art graduate students per year as their final thesis show. The culminating exhibition launches them into their profession as an artist. With the series, we underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s innovative contemporary art scene.


hazel batrezchavez received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Studio Art and Anthropology from Grinnell College in 2017. Since then she has been a part of various group exhibitions and pop-up shows in the United States, specifically in California, New Mexico, Iowa, and most recently México City, and Michoacán, México. batrezchavez is a recipient of the Center of Fine Arts, Dean’s Travel Grant Award, MaryAnn Evans Grant and of both the Lucile Lattanner Reid Brock and the Betty Sabo Scholarship. At the moment batrezchavez is partnering with the Santa Fe Dreamers Project as part of her StoryMaps Fellowship at the Santa Fe Arts Institute (SFAI) to create a collaborative project, that centers the voices of humans that have been forced to migrate from their homelands. As she continues to prepare for a performance at the border ports of entry in El Paso and Brownsville, Texas following her own families migration. She currently resides in Albuquerque and teaches Introduction to Art Practices and Shop Foundations while working towards her MFA in Sculpture at the University of New Mexico.

 

MK (Monica Kennedy) is an artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2017, they received their BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston andare currently attending the University of New Mexico for their MFA in Photography. They are originally from a small rural town by the name of Sulligent, Alabama, and this place has become a driving force for the mass majority of their work.

Using found items, stories, and the longing to be back with their family in this small town. They work in a variety of mediums ranging from photography, printmaking and sculpture in order to pursue and question their upbringing, identity, family, and the terms of loss and memory. They have shown at institutions such as the Blaffer Art Museum, The National Hispanic Cultural Center and SITE Santa Fe.