Sandra Monterroso

Sandra Monterroso
The Healing Paradox

The Healing Paradox marks Sandra Monterroso's second solo show at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino. Continuing her interest in Guatemalan textiles as art-making material and as tools to address her country's embattled history, Monterroso, an artist with Maya Q'eqchi' roots, focuses her attention this time on more modest materials. Leftover fabrics from a local rug factory and organic cotton and linen embellished with embroidery and neon lights effectively become a compelling locus where discussions about healing wounds within a complex postcolonial heritage occur. 

Monterroso utilizes soft materials paired with manufactured objects to construct visual paradoxes. For example, several pieces are made of fabrics originally destined for landfills. Woven by indigenous hands who labor for low salaries to produce beautifully crafted rugs for luxury homes, the scraps tangentially point to a socioeconomic hierarchy between the haves and have-nots. In rescuing the discarded materials, Monterroso performs a redeeming ritual, imbuing them with new life as artworks and, paradoxically, transforming them into repositories of the inequalities, discrimination, and racism that still exist toward marginalized groups without openly highlighting their victimization. In their conclusive form, the pieces are joined to create a whole, mending leads to metaphorical healing.

Color is an important signifier connecting Maya Q'eqchi's culture to Monterroso's personal history. The artist is known for her extensive use of indigo and cochineal dyes, with which she colors her textiles and yarns. There is evidence that the Mayas used indigo to create Mayan blue, a pigment developed in the late pre-Classic period, 1900 BC to 200 AD. It can be found in Mesoamerican pottery, murals, and archeological artifacts. The cochineal comes from a tiny cactus-dwelling insect harvested to produce a red dye. While the indigenous people used the red pigment to dye their textiles and for its healing properties and associations with divine light and the sun, the Spanish conquistadors viewed it as a source of wealth. As European demand for cochineal increased, its production became another form of indigenous exploitation. The inclusion of these pigments in the title of many of Monterroso's works, for example, Like the Triangles: The Celestial Water and the Indigofera Give Us Back the Light and Like the Rhombus: The Earth and the Cochineal Give us Back the Light, underscores their relevance in the rituals of her ancestors and her role in preserving such knowledge. The triangle and diamond-shaped neon lights appended to the fabric stand in for territory/land; the slightly discernible circle inside the neon is a seed, a symbol of birth, growth, and land cultivation. To say that their inclusion seems paradoxical is true; their electric-powered presence gives back the light needed in an altered state of consciousness to enter a moment of reflection on modernity or, more precisely, on the open wounds resulting from the encounters and disagreements that occurred while going through this modernity.