THE FIRE NEXT TIME.
AmericanHorse (L) and Channing Concho of Acoma Pueblo take a selfie after a sculpture of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate was removed on June 16, 2020 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The previous evening a protester was shot while others were trying to pull down the statue of Oñate, who was known for his cruelty to the Native Americans. Pueblo and Chicano leaders have been trying for decades to have the statue removed.
Photo by Paul Ratje
THE FIRE NEXT TIME…a longing in our hearts….
POSTPONED
THE FIRE NEXT TIME is an exhibition that looks back to last summer’s national and regional protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Symbols of Confederate and colonial oppression took center stage in gathering forces imagining an undeniable reckoning. Simultaneously terrifying and hopeful, the protests of last summer are a year behind us. This exhibition will include ephemera from recent protests in hopes to remind us of the people, passion, commitment and sacrifice many of our communities made in hope of a better tomorrow. Part memorial, part instigation, part celebration – the artists in this exhibition want you to dig deep today and tomorrow.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the James Baldwin book published in 1963. The title is a reminder of the long history of white supremacy and the deadly struggle for equality in this country. The Fire Next Time brings together local artists working in sound, performance, painting and physical objects. These works exist against a backdrop of community sourced signs, banners and objects from the demonstrations and protests of last summer. The exhibition also honors community led projects emphasizing the good that can be done when community members come together.
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.
HOLD YOU by Tamara Zibners
Image credit: Tamara Zibners, ,Close Up #66, Hold You. Inkjet Print, 44”x 44”, 2020
HOLD YOU
Tamara Zibners
APRIL 2 – MAY 1, 2021
Closing Reception: Friday, April 30 5-7pm
Masks Required
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents HOLD YOU by Tamara Zibners. Zibners looks at the fleeting period of time during early motherhood when she and her child are physically connected. Throughout their day together, Zibners makes simple photographs with her phone, which she later transforms into digital drawings by using the images as underlays. Using the original colors as a source, she alters and pushes the palate to enhance or confuse the mood and amplify the abstract nature of the shapes found through loose contours. Some drawings are finished works, and others she reworks into collage pieces of various sizes, each an amalgamation of the myriad of colors and moods that are present in the digital drawings. Zibners intends to create an image that is recognizable as a domestic snapshot, but is degraded, cartoonish and abstract. The result is a body of work that is at once disorienting and familiar, grotesque but tender. After this pandemic’s year of physical distance, Zibners hopes that this work, which is ultimately about human touch, vibrates with extra intensity.
Tamara Zibners was born in Carmichael, California. In 2004 she received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her Masters in Fine Art from the University of New Mexico in 2011. She is currently enjoying working in her studio and caring for her child at the Roswell Artist in Residence compound in Roswell, New Mexico.
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
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.
POLYCEPHALY
View Exhibition
AUGUST 7 – 28
ALICIA LISA BROWN, WILL GABALDON, LUCIA LOVE, BABETTE RITTENBERG, RHIAN PRITCHARD, SARAH SARCHIN
Sanitary Tortilla Factory is excited to present Polycephaly, a group show of painters and multimedia artists that features human heads in some form. From traditional portraits, to the wild, raucous distortions of surreal cartoon figures- Polycephaly, is the condition in which a creature, human or animal, has multiple heads. The work in the exhibition shares a superficial theme of figuration, while simultaneously being deeply divergent in thought and approach. In conjunction with the show, there will be a scheduled series of online artist conversations that aims to facilitate inter art community dialogue. All of the presented artists are based in cities around the country and will discuss their work with a local Albuquerque based artist. The video talks will explore various themes, subject matter, and processes, as well as observations on the impact of the current historical climate on their local arts communities. Albuquerque video participants include: Frank Blazquez, Jodie Herrera, Jessamyn Lovell, Earl McBride, Helen Atkins and Nancy Zastudil. Polycephaly is curated by Hannah Bluhm.
Artist Talks Release Schedule:
8/07/20 “Polycephaly: Jessamyn Lovell & Alicia Lisa Brown”
8/13/20 “Polycephaly: Will Gabaldon & Helen Atkins”
8/14/20 “Polycephaly: Lucia Love & Earl McBride”
8/20/20 “Polycephaly: Frank Blazquez & Babette Rittenberg”
8/21/20 “Polycephaly: Jodie Herrera & Rhian Pritchard”
8/27/20 “Polycephaly: Sarah Sarchin & Nancy Zastudil”