Landscape is My Sir: Migueltzinta Solis, MFA Thesis Exhibition
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University of Lethbridge Dr. Foster James Penny Building 324 5 St. South, Lethbridge, Alberta T1J 2B5
Migueltzinta Solís, "Landscape is My Sir," 2019
About the work - Landscape is My Sir: Migueltzinta Solis, MFA Thesis Exhibition
This body of work aims to construct a cosmology of desire and perversity, which functions to unsettle existing narratives of power and landscape. A composite immersive experience built of performances, installations, videos and weavings, this body of work performs a collision of rural, colonial and queer imaginaries. Through this coupling of imaginaries, these works consider relationships between land and gender, western expansion and the imaging of colonially occupied territory. The work creates new visual languages with which to better comprehend cultural hybridity and the queering and unsettling of rural cultural paradigms. Using built and found sites, the work introduces a performance persona, Chico California, a (probably trans) homosexual leatherman seeking to engage in erotic relationships with space, site and inanimate objects. Chico California, a mysterious semi-feral misanthrope, makes his provocative, problematic and un-procreative advances on Nature and Landscape discoverable, presenting the onlooker with opportunities to encounter him in his habits of desire.
About the artistMigueltzinta Solís was raised in Mexico and California. An interdisciplinary artist, he works in various mediums including performance, video, textile and installation. Through his work he explores questions of power, gender, territory, perversity, institutional intrigue and the North American West. Migueltzinta holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from The Evergreen State College in Washington State. He is very gay and very trans.