Seed Unseed: works by Vick Quezada

Seed Unseed: Works by Vick Quezada

ON View January 31, 2020 until April 27, 2020

At the Latinx Project at NYU 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor NY, NY 11211

Vick Quezada will exhibit recent works related to their projects around Indigenous-Latinx hybridity and how material histories function in contested lands and particularly the US Mexico border. The exhibit will loop Quezada’s performance in El Paso, Texas along with sculptural works and documentation that elucidates the artist’s process and vision. The show will open to the public January 31st and be on view during building hours until April 27, 2020. 

Curatorial Statement

In Seed Unseed by Vick Quezada we are presented with work that asks questions about lost and hidden indigenous philosophies and aims to relocate pre-colonial conceptions of queer identity and sexuality. The filmed performance and focal point for this exhibition, Seed Unseed, takes place in the borderland region adjacent to Mexico, the lower valley of El Paso, Texas. As a site of literal bisection of land, culture and people, the border becomes the perfect site to unearth histories about colonization and question widely accepted narratives around gender binaries. Using zea mays, the ancient seed that sprouts maize, a plant that contains both male and female reproductive organs, Quezada investigates this natural resistance to binaries. Maize or corn was also an ancient symbol of sustenance and had a central place in many creation myths of the Americas. It took form as a range of deities, a principal ceremonial element, and in some stories was the ingredient that spawned humans. By intervening into the land, planting these seeds and stimulating growth in areas proximate to oil refineries, highways, and colonial churches that once served as boundary markers for Spanish territory, Quezada engages in a symbolic act of decolonization. An act that goes beyond looking backwards in nostalgia but melds with the present, asks questions of the future, and summons vestigial memories of an existence that could only be repressed but never tamed.

Artist Bio

Vick Quezada’s works (they/ them) queers the archaeological. Quezada’s projects explore the material histories and consciousness of Indigenous-Latinx hybridity within Western culture. They use a variety of mediums including sculpture, photography, video, and performances embodying ancient Nahuan rites to simultaneously make the obscured visible. Their artifacts delineate inherent systems of power and subjectivity in the Americas while transgressing “official” historical accounts. Quezada’s incorporation of natural elements, such as soil and flora, reference Indigenous beliefs that all beings are interconnected; that spirit earth and the cosmology are one.

Covered by Remezcla by Eva Recinos as one of the most exciting Latino arts exhibitions in the first half of this year.