Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez

Lives and works in TX, USA

Artist statement

My practice is a way of reconciling with sifted narratives and histories of the "Central American-American" experience. I combine memories, false memories, and truth to formulate visual attempts to better understand the relationships between neighboring nations, cultures and personal experiences. Researching the Salvadoran diaspora, I cultivate questions about historical events and investigate gaps that remain in those narratives. My photographs and installations confront the management of historical consequences in order to create a different perspective that disrupts existing narratives about Central Americans in the U.S. I respond to images from various resources --including personal and media archives, and other select materials -- considering each sourced image’s histories, context, original purpose, and who and what it serves today. In my most recent installations, I determine a predominant color for each work by using Photoshop to color-sample skin tones of figures from various images, and then averaging each sample to create a new combination color. I use this new color in a variety of materials like paint, fabric or dirt that serve as a materialization and extension of the images used. Being open to various color matching systems and their technologies make the color vulnerable to various processes. These channels of gathering information and it's interpretation to the way it "sees" color speak to the filtering and editing of the sourced colors’ identity and...

Artwork