Diego Juarez

MFA

Emerging from time spent thinking about being a small part of a larger whole, I ask how the landscape is an idea that is produced and reproduced by overlapping personal and political systems. Language is explored through poetics and transliterated as painting, sculpture and printed matter. Through the language of abstraction and discarded material, these works become complex sites of negotiation between external and intrapersonal forces. Like abstraction, poetry’s ability to deconstruct and reconstruct language creates new understandings, building connections between cultural narratives, hidden labor, personal histories, and environmental disruption.  

Intuition built from metaphorical and allegorical inferences guide me toward objects and spaces perceived as defunct. In transitional sites like open lots, train yards, and highway shoulders, I prioritize reality by collecting and collaborating with material. Chance is embraced and deep relationships form over time. Various printmaking techniques, collage, and gestural mark making prompt subtle transformations. Abrasion, carving, staining, and rubbing fully incorporate materials into incongruous abstract surfaces, each holding a distinct record of time. Digital images and text migrate in and out of the work as forms of notation, in recognition of the ways perception is always mediated. Oscillating between the intimate size of the page and scales that subsume the body creates a deep awareness of space.  

Landscapes are often anthropomorphized and flattened into images onto which human beings project desires. As political and economic propaganda, landscape painting has a long history as a tool for justifying colonization and mythologizing westward expansion. Utilizing this modality, I decenter human narrative and foreground cycles of destruction and repair as a record of planetary time. This time scale lets us navigate space more compassionately, as extensions of our planet rather than disparate individuals.