Rosemary Meza-DesPlas

Lives and works in Farmington, NM, USA

Artist statement

As a multidisciplinary artist, I create figurative artworks exploring gender inequality, political agency, and cultural misconceptions. Challenging beauty standards, the feminine body is portrayed with attention to veracity. Portraiture work emphasizes the mutable nature of the face. My studio practice varies from labor intensive hand-stitched hair art to large on-site, multimedia installations. Feminism and ethnicity are referenced in a common material, human hair, employed in my studio practice. I sew with the first fiber: hair. My sewing can be contextualized within the 1970s women’s craft movement, yet I stitch hair from a drawing-based background. The hair serves as an archive of my body and reflects the aging process. A carrier of DNA, hair symbolizes ethnicity and race. Identity and culture manifest in my traditional art forms of painting and drawing. Displayed multiples create sizable and organized installations. Through appropriation, these traditional media works are reinvented into specialty fabrics and embedded into performance art and video. I forefront myself in the performance art and video works; thereby, alluding to the multiplex experience of being an American, Indigenous, Latina woman. My poetry anchors the performance art and video works. Academic research and writings reinforce the thematic inquiries into gender topics, socio-political issues, and cultural stereotypes.

Artwork