Gabriella Sanchez Muddles The Boundaries Of Identity In "By Any Other Name"
If there was one cinematic moment that perfectly captured the tumultuous duplicity I felt as a Mexican-American growing up in the southwest, it was Abraham Quintanilla Jr. (played by Edward James Olmos) haranguing his children, the famous musicians Selena (Jennifer Lopez) and A.B. Quintanilla (Jacob Vargas), in the 1997 biopic Selena. The siblings are distraught when their father shoots down the opportunity for the Texas-based family band to play a gig in Mexico, citing that they won’t be accepted with the same warmth they’ve received in the U.S. because they aren’t Mexican, they’re Mexican-American.
He gripes about the difficulty that embodying such a hyphenated identity presents and, in a speech familiar to so many Mexican-American, explains: “We gotta prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are, and we gotta prove to the Americans how American we are. We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans and we gotta be more American than the Americans both at the same time. It’s exhausting.”
Gabriella Sanchez, "A Hand Embraced," 2018 (Charlie James Gallery)
Gabriella Sanchez, "So Much, Too Much," 2018 (Charlie James Gallery)
This complex navigation of an identity that is both and neither, one and its other, develops in its subject a ruptured identity, and it’s here that Los Angeles artist Gabriella Sanchez finds inspiration for her first solo exhibition. In "By Any Other Name," the artist explores issues of identity, language, and place(lessness). Indeed, the exhibition renders all these thematic elements clear from its name alone–a well-read viewer will recognize that it descends from the mouth of one of anglophone literature’s most tragic heroines, Juliet, who laments her star-crossed love and implores that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Sanchez, in testing the expansiveness of this linguistic utterance, repositions the figure of the rose to explore a uniquely Mexican-American identity by considering the flower’s function in the Western literary and artistic canon, and in Mexican culture where it is often a symbol of love, spirituality, and commerce.
Gabriella Sanchez, "Wilde Flowers," 2018 (Charlie James Gallery)
Gabriella Sanchez, "Rebel, Rebel," 2018 (Charlie James Gallery)
Far from distracting the viewer with a dizzying array of seemingly disparate signifiers, Sanchez’s amalgam of symbols, both visual and textual, present the psychic interiority of an artist living at the intersection. Sanchez unabashedly mixes quotidian emblems of her own background with items from the cultural zeitgeist, juxtaposing images of street lamps and rearview mirrors with references to Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Indeed, the artist's own Mexican-American background remains a consistent through-line in her works. Many of the exhibition’s pieces utilize blackletter, the script of choice for Los Angeles cholos in graffiti and tattoos, and embroidered roses, embroidery being a prominent craft in Mexican culture.
The works of art themselves, too, seem to resist conforming to social preconceptions, as the paintings employ a number of materials, such acrylic paint, sharpie, pastel, pencil, embroidered appliqués, and even photographs, imbuing the finished works with the profound and earnest authenticity of inhabiting plurality.
Gabriella Sanchez, "Homes," 2018 (Charlie James Gallery)
Gabriella Sanchez, "Anyone," 2018 (Charlie James Gallery)
While much of the art is autobiographical, it isn’t overly didactic nor does it sermonize on Sanchez’s experiences in an effort to extrapolate on all Latinx experiences in the U.S. Rather, Sanchez presents us with these signifiers of a life marked by a multiplicity of identity–an identity which dares to value the textile traditions of abuelas as greatly as the works of Shakespeare–and invites us to consider how we construct narratives about ourselves, and how these constructs are received.
Charlie James Gallery, 969 Chung King Road., L.A. Through August 18; Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. 213.687.0844, www.cjamesgallery.com