Calendar
March 30, 2024
Window Dressing - AN INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
March 30, 2024
Teresa Flores
AN INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
Mar 17 – Mar 30, 2024
Teresa Flores is a multidisciplinary artist who explores connections between her Chicana identity and the notion of
the California Dream. Through drawing, painting, video, and social practice Flores explores the ways generations of
colonialism and assimilation in California have affected families like her own, who can trace their ancestor’s
migration along the Pacific coast for generations. In exploring food and movement, collective art making and
nurturing, Flores seeks innovative avenues of expression and pathways to healing. Her Window Dressing
installation, An Intergenerational Transmission, consists of both window signage and a video presentation. The
window signage is constructed from readymade LED neon wiring, wood, nails and hot glue. The sign, which spells
out the words We Can Make Our Own, references the idea of collective autonomy and the economics of the Los
Angeles artist tradition of the neon sign. The piece is based on a smaller 2017 LED neon sign and fully embraces the
makeshift Chicanx practice of rasquachismo by not trying to hide imperfections in the construction process of the
sign. Tortilla Burning is a durational video from 2007 that focuses on a single tortilla burning on a stove over a
twenty minute period. The burning tortilla is a reflection on colonialism and assimilation in California. The video
was created in remembrance of the time the artist’s grandmother spent in the child foster care system in Southern
California in the early 1930s, where she was forced to cook and clean for her Mexican-American foster families
while being abused and isolated for her indigeneity. Together, the two artworks celebrate humanity’s will to
survive in the face of ferocious and shifting capitalist and imperialist world hegemony. They investigate our
capacities to create when in survival mode and make visible the marks and burns of struggle and imperfection.
East-LA based multimedia artist Teresa Flores is an inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Her drawings, paintings,
videos, and social practice projects have been featured in Alta Journal, The New Yorker, and NPR and have been presented at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, Spike Art Quarterly in Berlin, and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. Flores has also exhibited with
Dominique Gallery, Espacio 1839, and has been a featured artist in the annual Venice Family Clinic Art Walk and Auction. Flores studied
drawing and painting at Fresno State, original home of the feminist art movement, before receiving her Public Practice MFA from Otis
College of Art and Design, where she earned the recognition of Outstanding Alumni.