Rocio Graham

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Rocio Graham, “Book III, Illuminations and Engulfment,” 2020

archival inkjet print, 24” x 42” (courtesy Christine Klassen Gallery, Calgary)

As a girl in Mexico, Rocio Graham watched her grandmother minister to the ill with herbs and chants. She took part in traditional Indigenous ceremonies and read magic realism by Mexican author Laura Esquivel. Little wonder, then, that her latest work camouflages the female form in nature in ways that verge on the metaphysical. 

For her solo show, Illuminations and Engulfment, on view at the Christine Klassen Gallery in Calgary until March 5 as part of the Exposure Photography Festival, Graham photographed herself outdoors, disguised with flowers, tree branches and other organic material.

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Rocio Graham, “Book I, Illuminations and Engulfment,” 2020

archival inkjet print, 42” x 28” (courtesy Christine Klassen Gallery, Calgary)

In one image, she floats on her back ringed by flowers, a pose that calls to mind Ophelia, a painting by British pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Another shows her standing clad in greenery between several towering trees. This one makes me think Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s Tree of Life. In yet another, she poses in a wintry swamp beneath a headdress of dried flowers and seed pods. Here I find myself thinking of nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) artist Meryl McMaster’s work. Like these other artists, Graham’s poetic images weave together cultural metaphors about nature and the female body.  

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Rocio Graham, “Book VII, Illuminations and Engulfment,” 2020

archival inkjet print, 42” x 28” (courtesy Christine Klassen Gallery, Calgary)

Graham, who moved to Canada almost 20 years ago, made the series largely over the last year, working both in the B.C. Interior, where she sheltered from the COVID-19 pandemic on a farm owned by her husband’s family, and around Calgary, where she has lived in recent years. She describes a deeply introspective process that relates to her history of trauma, as well as the earth-centred practices she was exposed to growing up in Mexico's Sonoran Desert. 

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Rocio Graham, “Book II, Illuminations and Engulfment,” 2020

archival inkjet print, 28” x 42” (courtesy Christine Klassen Gallery, Calgary)

“I started spending a lot of time in the forest and really thinking a lot about my mortality,” she says. “And also thinking about the irony that we feel we can control nature … but at the end of the day, nature always shows that it has the power.” She explored her urge to hide and pondered how animals protect themselves through mimicry and camouflage. “In a way, I wanted to disappear into the forest.” She began covering herself with moss and lichens, acting out dreams and memories, and even singing to the trees. “I didn’t have a plan, per se,” she says. “I was exploring and I was processing what I was going through with the pandemic, the feelings and the thoughts.”

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Rocio Graham, “Book V, Illuminations and Engulfment,” 2020

archival inkjet print, 28” x 42” (courtesy Christine Klassen Gallery, Calgary)

The public focus on inclusion and social justice over the last year opened her to the possibility of making a documentary record of such deeply personal work, using her 40-something brown body. “It was a lot of permission for people to show themselves and the way they are,” she says. “To be honest, for me, I felt like I felt like I needed to show myself fully, even the secrecy of my mystical practices.”

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Rocio Graham, “When I Think of Home #15,” 2020

archival inkjet print on metallic paper, 40” x 60” (courtesy Christine Klassen Gallery, Calgary)

Graham also includes work from two other series in the show. The first, When I Think of Home, is composed of photographic tableaus of decaying plant matter initially inspired by crab apples rotting in her compost bin. She photographed them and then began layering flowers in the bin.  “I felt like it was a portrait,” she says. “I was thinking: ‘This my life.’ There is so much beauty and so much colour, and so much lushness with the flowers and greens. And there’s so much pain and sadness.” 

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Rocio Graham, “Future Memories #21,” 2019-2020

cyanotype print, 26” x 30” (courtesy Christine Klassen Gallery, Calgary)

Her final series, Future Memories, created during a recent residency at Contemporary Calgary  themed around the building’s history as a planetarium, is composed of cyanotypes, an early photographic technique. She scattered seeds across the developing cyanotype, evoking clusters of stars and other galactic phenomena against a deep blue backdrop.

“The seeds have these beautiful parallels to how the cosmos operates and how it moves and collapses,” she says. “When people walk into the gallery, I want them to feel like they are seeing the night sky.” ■ 

Rocio Graham: Illuminations and Engulfment at the Christine Klassen Gallery in Calgary from Jan. 29 to March 5, 2021.

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