Denisse Griselda Reyes

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Straddling the lines of assimilation, refuge, and self-preservation, my work interrogates the boundaries of representation by publicly engaging with memory. Across painting, film, sculpture, performance, and installation, I use photographic and video archives to ground my practice in the (in)visible social structures of modern life, whether the torment of the Salvadoran Civil War or the awkwardness of a first date. Young girls with fierce gazes become the protagonists in my paintings, while fragments from home videos, MRIs, ultrasounds, and vitrines of childhood teeth reassemble into sculptural forms that generate new realities. Through these archival excavations, preservation becomes mythmaking, allowing me to trace the ghosts of our sociological imagination. Gaps in my family dramas are filled with reenactments where I perform as my alter ego Griselda, an indignant iconoclast, part-narrator, part-drag-persona, part-survival-strategy, using humor to push against the limited Latinx narrative of pain and suffering. Balancing tragedy and pleasure, my work builds an aesthetic language of recuperation and salvage to bridge fractured histories of post–civil war Salvadoran life and its diaspora. Through these different mediums, my work seeks to negotiate an agreement with the present moment rather than with a distant future, exploring how close one can get to reality before losing touch with it. These layered temporalities and representations of the self have shaped exhibitions...

Artwork