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.