¡ bienvenidxs !
Alejandra García was born in San Diego, California and spent much of her youth traveling back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work is centered around a protagonist named diosa, who embodies Alejandra’s exploration of her identity as a Mexican American woman. Alejandra combines visually grotesque imagery with moments of delicate tenderness in order to convey feelings of self-love and self-hatred. Her practice is rooted in introspection and in her desire to meld the aspects of herself that often feel contradictory. Through her work, Alejandra aims to take up space, to show that diosa and those who identify with her story can and should be the subject of fine art.
García received her BA in Visual Arts and English from Fordham University in New York in 2021, where she graduated summa cum laude and was awarded departmental honors in Visual Arts. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in San Diego; including shows at La Bodega Gallery, Chicano Art Gallery, and Logan Ave Galería de Arte. She was the recipient of the 2020 Susan Lipani Travel Award. García was the Education Department Intern at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York from 2020-2021, and was an Artist Educator and Program Assistant at MAD. She worked as a creative tutor for A Free Bird, a non-profit organization that offers art classes for children battling cancer and other chronic illnesses.
García was a recipient of the 2021-2022 Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley Award in the Arts at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris. She had her first solo exhibition entitled “tócame.” at the Fondation des États-Unis in April of 2022. García went on to be an artist in residence at Casa Lü in Mexico City and exhibited her drawings in Casa Lü’s closing group show entitled “Take Me, Too” in September of 2022.
statement
García’s work contemplates the nature of her relationships to others, to the world she inhabits, and to her own self. The protagonist of García’s oeuvre is a character named diosa. diosa’s body, at once grotesque and skeletal, as well as tender and fleshy, represents the unease and discomfort that García feels as a result of being a Mexican-American woman who has experienced pressures to assimilate to white, American culture, as well as over sexualization and fetishization.
García’s upbringing in the San Diego-Tijuana border region provides the context for the liminal spaces in which diosa finds herself. García’s compositions are, at first glance, simple portraits, but upon closer examination, one finds that they are rife with symbols that induce nostalgia and the idea that we often cling to romanticized versions of our pasts through material objects. Through her paintings and drawings, García searches for meaning, for her place in the world. She makes friends with her past lovers and the most flawed parts of herself. She examines toxic masculinity by portraying masculine figures with masks that seem to be permanently fixed on their faces and by portraying their detached nature in attempted moments of intimacy.
García also ruminates on aging and mortality. Tokens from her childhood wander into her present: a Hello Kitty plushie smoking a blunt with a lighter nestled into her body keeps diosa company as she transforms into a two-headed version of herself. In other pieces, diosa attempts to cling to fractured parts of her ancestors, in the hopes of making peace with life’s finality and the ephemerality of her body.
Sometimes the victim, at other times the aggressor, or antagonist, diosa is the incarnation of contradicting dualities, of the feeling that one is one’s own savior and enemy. Bright, fluorescent color palettes amplify the intensity of physical and emotional anguish that diosa experiences, and proves rather ironic given the dark, negative subjects, which García explores.