Mateo Gutierrez

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I place my practice dead center in the wreckage of the American so-called experiment, isolating the digital spectacle of trauma from our endless, scrolling consumption. I am interested in what happens when the fleeting, automated violence of the screen is translated into the slow, meticulous labor of the stitch. ​Embroidery is historically a medium of warmth and domesticity. To use it to render the cold, structural violence of modern empire forces a quiet contradiction that I like. The time invested in hand-embroidery at this scale acts as a deliberate refusal of the instantaneous nature of modern suffering. It acknowledges that our cultural violence and the grief it creates are not sudden fractures, but deep, inherited patterns. They are old wounds carefully restitched, generation after generation.

Artwork