Installation view of Nepantla: Border Arte at Finch Lane Gallery with work by Mika Rane (right and left) and Ali Arocho (center) on the back wall; on the side wall, from left, Bianca Velasquez, Lunares, Vicky Lowe and Sara Serratos; and on the floor, Sara Serratos and Jazmin Guzman. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

A trend that has emerged on the international art scene is getting national notice, not all of it positive. These artists and their works depart markedly from the modernism of the past century. Where in the past there were specific movements—Impressionism, Cubism, the Fauves, The Blue Rider—today’s artists work alone, generally under the label Contemporary, and are usually collected by a new agent, the curator, often to contribute one or two works to a group show. Curated exhibitions essentially mix and match, each curator creating what amounts to an individual recipe in which subjects, styles and techniques are like flavors. One of the more controversial characteristics of this trend is an emphasis on the participant’s individual experience and identity. Where once artists sought to find the universal in the particular, in the eyes of unsympathetic critics they now foreground what amount to personal complaints.

Another essential agent besides the curator is the theorist, whose ideas are usually independent of the thing they are intended to explain. While it’s often argued that if the art is good, a theory isn’t necessary, and if it’s not, the theory doesn’t matter, in actual practice a strong theory can make independent efforts seem to share a common source of inspiration and help the public to make sense of them.

In the case of Nepantla: Border Arte, currently at Finch Lane, we’re told up front that the theory comes from Gloria Anzaldúa, an influential scholar who traced the evolution of a term that survived the wholesale destruction of Central American indigenous cultures after their subjugation by Spanish military and religious forces. Nepantla, which takes the linguistic form of a place name, refers to the fact or feeling of being in between two entities, neither of which one quite belongs to. Another, less specifically ethnic term in popular use by today’s artists is “liminal,” as in “liminal space.” Clearly while this concept is experiencing a vogue, it’s neither new nor particularly local.

Mika Rane, “Sembrando el Jardín Secreto”

Jazmin Guzman, “Inner Pillars.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

There are a baker’s dozen artists in the show at Finch Lane, not many of whom will be strangers to the Utah audience. In the center of the room, Jazmin Guzman, a 2024 artist-in-residence at the Leonardo, has installed “Inner Pillars,” a set of six cyanotype-on-glass portraits of Hispanic women that seems to illustrate the process of cultural acclimation. While the face at one end bears the most indigenous-looking features, and that at the other end the most international, it is of course only necessary to view them in the reverse order to see how both the facts of DNA and those of cultural hegemony can equally serve as “pillars” of identity.

Nearby, Sara Serratos, whose solo self-portrait occupied the back gallery here in 2023, while her compound installation on food was recently at BCAC, shows excerpts from both. The title of her “Institutional Photography” indicts the agencies that strip away both identity and privacy at the same time, but it also points to the widespread corruption of photography. She goes on to take her image through an entertaining creative process in spite of its original intentions being so dehumanizing.

A more conventional medium than glass or video is employed by Mao Barroteran in “La Línea,” in which the title line is the horizon that crosses the canvas, only to violate its borders by continuing on to the backing panel, to which the canvas is purportedly only temporarily attached by grommets, in a metaphor that aptly describes much of modern experience. On the canvas, meanwhile, are drawn animals, icons and automobiles, along with a few spherical objects of a somewhat more abstract nature. It’s a purely personal selection, maybe a record of a time spent in rumination, perhaps a story his memory spontaneously told him. It’s about as casual, yet precise a psychic self-portrait as can be expected.

Without question, the most important cultural object here is Virginia “Vicky” Lowe’s back strap loom, part of her “Esperanza (Hope).” In weaving, of course, space, line, texture, tension—all the elements of design—are physical parts rather than superficial surface qualities. Furthermore, the sophistication of Latin American weaving achieved on a loom stretched between the weaver’s body and an immobile object, such as a tree, was a source of fascination and influence on European artists, who had grown accustomed to elaborate studio surroundings. To take only one example, Anni Albers dedicated her seminal book, On Weaving, to her “great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.” In Albers’ day, of course, “in between” had a different meaning. She began her work in her native Germany, at the Bauhaus, where prejudice against women in the arts forced her from painting to textiles. She soon enough fled yet more persecution, as a Jew, by the Nazis, and ended up at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Along the way she did as much as anyone to break down the line dividing craft from art.    

The accessibility provided to weaving, whether by back strap or other portable looms, has not prevented its products being added to the materials list of upscale work, assemblage, and collage. Kelly Tapia-Chuning dismantled a serape for her “Where sky meets wind; changing directions.” Elsewhere, she also uses familiar speech, another model for the challenge of being somehow detached and in between. Languages, after all, strand us not only between cultures, but far more often between one person’s presumed meaning and another’s unstated intention. When her fabrics spell out “Women ruin everything,” we know at once the gap is between male presumption and reality, while when she asks “Would a feminist kick a guy in the nuts?” the response seems to depend on the viewer’s mental picture of “a guy.”

Curator Roxanne Gray introduces her exhibition in a delightful and seductive, bilingual fashion, stating “These artists exist in nepantla, exploring identidad through autohistoria, testimonio, and the never ending plática surrounding who tells the stories . . .” In most of the world, this is how people routinely talk, selecting the appropriate term from the vocabularies known to be present. Gray’s cognates—words of similar meaning that also sound alike in various languages—help to create the same kind of common feelings as artworks aim for, which are rare in verbal languages, but common in a shared visual vocabulary. However one feels about the way art is changing, such exercises can only help to break down barriers and free up Nepantla, the liminal spaces between zones, not just for passage, but as good neighborhoods to live in.

Installation view of Nepantla: Border Arte with work by, from left, Kelly Tapia-Chuning, Miguel Hernandez and Mika Rane. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Nepantla: Border Arte, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through May 30.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.