embodied 1.4
EMBODIED | ISSUE 4
How connected are we to the land around us? To say that our physical and mental life is linked to nature is to acknowledge that we are part of something outside of ourselves. In this issue, three artists explore the physical and psychic terrain of the landscape and how their bodies inhabit it.
Andrew Duardo, Salvador de la Torre, Kevin Ramirez
Andrew Duardo
Born in Orange County and raised in Victorville, Andrew Duardo is a queer artist who disrupts society's gender norms and the status quo through the use of analogue and digital photography. In his poignant imagery, he becomes the storyteller of his transness; tackling his gender identity, expression and sexuality through his art. He invites the viewer into the privy moments of his life in order to foster empathy and bring awareness to LGBTQ+ experiences.
Salvador de la Torre
Salvador de la Torre is a Mexican-born Texas-raised artist, educator and storyteller based in Southern California. Their drawing and performance work invoke the power of personal experience and family history to create artworks that exist at the intersection of activism, art production and praxes of self-acceptance. Their work engages politics of migration, memory, queerness, and gender in ways that remind us of the power and solidarity that can exist in quotidian gestures. De la Torre’s production opens channels for theorizing vulnerability, intimacy, and proximity as radical undertakings in the space of the borderlands and beyond. In doing so, their work forges complex narratives of joy, struggle, adaptability, exhaustion and tenderness, as counternarratives that assert the wholeness, nuance, and humanity of immigrant communities, and queer subjectivities. Salvador earned an MFA from California State University, Fullerton and a BA from Texas A&M International University.
Kevin Ramirez
Kevin Ramirez is a first-generation artist and graduate of California State University San Bernardino. Born and raised in Southern California, he now lives in Hesperia. His relationship with photography is shaped by his experiences of being Mexican and Salvadoran. His photographs document with care, the love he has for the Latinx community and those with shared struggles of migration, assimilation, and belonging. Through the use of analogue imagery, he embraces the nostalgia he feels for the places and people who move him.
His aim is to speak as an artist from his positionality as a brown man; present, past and future.
