2024 MFA Thesis Exhibition

My research/practice appropriates art as a privileged European discipline; from my position as a trans fem Mexican-Armenian settler (in several territories of Turtle Island) with Lebanese and Jewish-Spanish heritage. Most of my work is group and context specific. The works, series and projects have many titles added and changed through time both to point at difference, different audiences and meanings and to trouble the indexical/archival, and produce boundaries on these.

The practice has coined bitchy art, group specificity and open series as concepts to make the practice intelligible. The works visually disappoints and instead the practice affectively hits/interpellates and if it is not being uncomfortable, it then produces mystery and desire; a privileged site; that produces and communicates intelligibility and that uses art to render able. As I’m here thanks to individuals that rendered me able; making me feel and think that; −−ability is contingent and constructed! Working and entering conversations with multidisciplinary research as material.

My work is in the business (because we are in economies) of producing precedent, make feel the yet unseen and the yet unheard of. With pieces that render able by making bodies experience works that expand what gets theorized as art, and that expands with what others feel comfortable with producing as a practice.

Some works: produced, popularized and gave form to boundaries−−that informs or doubles down on precedent; produced feminist safety; formed anti patriarchal relations; queered contemporary comforts. The open series drawings are works where  eyes that in the everyday experience a more hostile world can rest. 

Performance, speech acts, language, stories, meaning making processes, mimesis, abuse, trauma, humiliation, exclusion, rejection, shame, health, intelligible affectivity, plural and complex emotions, interpretative and everyday violences, psychosocial dynamics, group formation and group processes, dignity, prestige, ethics, domination and submission, vulnerability, invisibility consent, boundaries and degradation are all in different ways forming and informing the practice. 

Lastly, my practice

Valeria or (b.late 90’s in Mexico City, Mexico; they or she or he) is a trans fem Mexican-Armenian artist with Lebanese and Jewish-Spanish heritage currently based on the unceded, ancestral and traditional lands of the Lenape people. She received a BFA at Emily Carr University with a major in Critical and Cultural Practices and currently doing an MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons. Most of her work is group and context specific, to cancel notions of universal audiences, to control circulation, to produce work for small circles of circulation and to uphold passing/appearing as a bitch doing bitchy art in specific contexts and to do cute art for other audiences. The works, series and projects have many titles added and changed through time to produce boundaries on the archival and inclusion, and to constantly trouble the complexities connected to naming.