04/21 – 07/09: “Fieldwork” Exhibited at Center for Contemporary Art

March 28, 2017

A selection from my expansive multidisciplinary project FIELDWORK will be exhibited in a four-month group exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art, April 21 – July 9, 2017 // Muñoz Waxman Gallery. Cryin’ Out Loud is a group exhibition that examines the role of women’s and femmes’ voices as expressed in art about politics, activism, and emotion. Considering both the metaphoric and literal voice, Cryin’ Out Loud explores and celebrates the use of art as a form of speaking up and out. A large group exhibition of works by selected artists will take place in CCA’s Muñoz Waxman Gallery.

For a complete look at the project FIELDWORK, visit my website: http://www.quintanwikswo.com/projects/fieldwork/

FIELDWORK is an autobiographical project about my many years in the femicide regions of the Southwest and US-Mexico border and Tohono O’Odham Reservation, my experienced being kidnapped and raped in a hate crime, and my time as a fieldworker setting up safe houses for sex trafficked women and children. For this project, I returned to sites where I used to work, and created a Vulture Vigilante alter ego. Wrapped in one of the mylar FEMA emergency blankets distributed in the safe houses and used by fieldworkers to protect the bodies of dumped women, the Vulture Vigilante both guards the site, exhumes the site, and harvests out the beliefs and behaviors of a human society in which the murders of women and girls are a normalized part of daily life. Her role is shamanic, for she walks between the world of the visible living and the invisible dead…yet she also walks between the versions of reality in which female lives are worthless and our violent deaths unremarkable, and a new future in which our bodies and psyches have intrinsic value. As the Vulture locates these bodies, she reveals that the bodies themselves are also hybrids – the women are being transformed from victims into vigilantes. She stands on their graves, invoking them to rise from the dead and seek retribution, justice, and social change.