“Emilio Rojas has had a really interesting career as a young artist. He was featured in an art festival in Spain and he’s been in a couple of bi-annuals and fairs, and so he’s sort of an emerging artist to look out for. I feel like his career is really going to take off,” said Ricardo Reyes, new director of galleries and curator for this collection
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary performance artist from Mexico. His work can be seen as live performances, video performances, films, photography, or objects. His work pertains greatly to his Mexican identity, specifically in relation to the U.S., particularly when it comes to the U.S.-Mexican border.
The exhibition being displayed at Lafayette College, “Tracing a Wound Through My Body,” is a survey of Rojas’ work over the last decade. The title “is really based on the notion of the border as a wound, an open wound, between the US and Mexico,” said Reyes.
Reyes explained that the big signature piece of this exhibition is “Heridas Abiertas,” which translates to “open wounds.” In this piece, Rojas had a tattoo artist inscribe the US-Mexican border on his back. Laurel McLaughlin, guest curator working on this exhibition, explained that they “have collaborated with Famous Tattoo Works in Easton, PA and specifically tattoo artist Victor Nieto on a performance with Emilio entitled Heridas Abiertas (to Gloria), a performance that the artist has performed every year since 2014 in which he has the U.S.-Mexican border tattooed down his spine without ink, resonating with Anzaldúas text concerning borderlands.”
There are also many performances and events accompanying the exhibition. These include a collaboration with Lafayette Film & Media Studies department and Philadelphia-based new media collective, Lino Kino, on a screening entitled Incarnations, featuring Emilio’s early performance-films, performances by Emilio at Skillman Library alongside Jason de León’s work, Hostile Terrain, a Zoom conversation between Emilio and Artist Laura Larson in collaboration with The Sigal Museum and Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society, and an artist lecture by Emilio.
Reyes explained that several of these events are called “activations,” as the artist comes to campus and interacts with, or activates, the space with a performance. Reyes encouraged students to go to the next event in Skillman library, “because the performance is around his memories of his father and there are popsicles involved. And so he’ll be handing out popsicles while he talks about memories of his dad. And so that’s part of the performance, like you eat popsicles with them. And he said that he’s making really cool flavors like tamarind or lavender, so I think it’ll be fun.”
More dates and details can be found on the calendar on the website.
“This was supposed to be in 2020, but it got postponed, and so Michiko Okaya (the previous director of galleries) was really looking for her last exhibition, because she had just announced that she was retiring, and she’s been following Emilio Rojas’ career for a while. And so she thought that he would be a good person to have as her final exhibition,” said Reyes.
“The exhibition aims to present ten years of artistic work by Emilio Rojas to audiences in Easton, PA.” said McLaughlin regarding the goal of this exhibition. “Tracing a wound through my body specifically reexamines the instrumentalization of Rojas’s body within his practice and also reckons with the compounded political and colonial traces impressed upon marginalized bodies, abstracted geopolitical territories, public monuments, and collectivities. For Rojas, such reckonings render palpable what Chicana, queer, and feminist theorist and poet Gloria E. Anzaldúa acknowledged heridas abiertas, or “open wounds,” with the potential for healing.”
Reyes added that “for exhibitions in general on this campus, the goals are to really use the exhibition space to the world around us. Through artwork, through design, through performances, film, videos, through the visual world, hopefully you can have a discussion about our world.”
Reyes emphasized how they hope that Lafayette students “become part of the conversation and address the ideas of international borders and geopolitical borders and physical borders and how this affects a contemporary life.”
“I hope that Lafayette students will be able to really rest alongside and simultaneously wrestle with this nuanced work from Emilio. I hope that they will question what they know about borders, community, care, and that which is left behind,” added McLaughlin.
The exhibition is being displayed in multiple places around campus. The main exhibition is in Grossman Gallery and Williams Visual Arts Center, down the hill. There are also two pieces in Skillman Library, one piece in Farinon Student Center, one piece in the lobby of Williams Center for the Arts, and one installation in the guard house at the west entrance of campus.
The exhibition guide in Grossman Gallery provides a map which will lead you to all of the locations for works. “We wanted to create the sense of movement across space, creating traces throughout campus as viewers encountered the exhibition,” explained McLaughlin.
The exhibition will be displayed until November 13th, 2021, and then it will travel to other hosting venues beginning in the Fall of 2022. All installations, events, and performances are free and require no registration.
“[Students] will be able to see amazing work by a performance artist who is established in the field and is doing fenomenal work. The students will be seeing really really amazing art that people would pay to see in the gallery but you can just see here for free,” said Anastasia Shakhurina, CaPA scholar who has been helping with preparations and advertising for the exhibition.