Alida Cervantes

Region: Pacific Coast

My artwork is an exploration of power relationships. My paintings, drawings, and mixed-media work examine hierarchies, question dominant historical narratives, and create imagined spaces where sex, love, and emotions are both freed and repressed. As an inheritor of Mexico’s colonial cultural discourse, my work draws from my own experiences of oppression and desire as a white, upper-class Mexican woman. My daily commute across the Mexico/US border provides the springboard into my investigations of racial, gender, and class relationships and perceptions on both sides of the border. I use fantasy, the grotesque, and dark humor in ambiguous, semi-narrative works that implicate wider narratives of colonial and postcolonial representation.