Join artists Emilio Rojas and Laura Larson for a conversation about the 19th-century Victorian genre of Hidden Mother photography and how it figures into Emilio Rojas’ new commissions in his “m(Other)s” series working with Latinx immigrant mothers and children from the Lehigh and Northampton communities. The works are on view in the Grossman Gallery of the Williams Visual Arts Building in the survey exhibition, “tracing a line through my body,” September 2–November 13, 2021. This event is co-hosted by the Lafayette College Art Galleries and the Sigal Museum and Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society.
Artist Bios:
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer Latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and an anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth.
His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as in institutions such as the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, the DePaul Art Museum, and the Botín Foundation. Rojas is a Visiting Artist/Scholar in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York, for the 2019–2022 academic years and the inaugural resident of the Judy Pfaff Foundation (2019–2020).
Mining the intersection between politics and poetics, Laura Larson’s work looks to photography’s history as a documentary practice to tell personal and sociocultural narratives. She’s exhibited her work extensively including Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her image-text book, Hidden Mother (Saint Lucy Books, 2017), presents a lyrical account of becoming a mother through adoption mapped through nineteenth-century hidden mother photographs. The book was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photobook Prize. Larson also organized a companion exhibition—the first to be devoted to this vernacular practice to be presented in the U.S.—which traveled from 2014-16 to Blue Sky Gallery, Palmer Museum of Art, Allen Memorial Art Museum, and Kennedy Museum of Art. She is the recipient of grants from Greater Columbus Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council, and the New York Foundation of the Arts, and of residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ucross Foundation. Her new book, City of Incurable Women, will be published by Saint Lucy Books in 2021 and she is currently working on a collaborative book with writer Christine Hume, All the Women I Know.
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