10004: Lo Que Grita mi piel

ARTIST
PRESS RELEASE

LUIS SAHAGUN: Lo Que Grita mi Piel
NADA HOUSE, Governors Island
September 1- October 1, 2023

Latchkey Gallery is proud to announce our participation in this year’s NADA House, Governors Island, NY.  On view from September 1 – October 1, 2023, LatchKey Gallery will highlight a larger than life-sized sculpture by Luis Sahagun. Lo Que Grita Mi Piel (That Which My Skin Screams), an anticolonial wearable sculpture that doubles as a surrogate ancestor and functions as a 3-dimensional topographical map exposing spiritual wounds inflicted by war and conquest.

The piece utilizes plastic replicas of La Virgen de Guadalupe bought in La Villita, Chicago, to question La Virgen’s symbol as liberator, as this symbolism grew out of a need for survival and cultural reclamation in the face of colonization and hardship and was notably used by Cesar Chavez as the principle image in farmworker organizing. However, the way contemporary Mexicans and Mexican-Americans view her is layered and complicated, and includes rejection and re-claiming, all of which her positioning and juxtaposition in the sculpture explore. Ultimately, Lo Que Grita mi Piel interrogates how the same symbols that have been used as tools of oppression can also be used to spotlight and celebrate the indigenous survival that has always been present alongside efforts at domination, leading us to a vision of how ancestral wisdom can support radical culture change in the here and now.

Additional works will be on view at the gallery through the duration of NADA House.

For inquiries, please contact: info@latchkeygallery.com

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1982, Luis Sahagun is an artist and ritualist who creates paintings and sculptures that confront the palpable inescapability of race, transforming them into acts of cultural reclamation. Like DNA strings of mestizaje, his practice sits at the intersections of contradictions — indian/conqueror, violence/unity, and ancient/contemporary. As a previously undocumented immigrant and former laborer, artist Luis Sahagun seeks to reveal the aesthetics of relocation and transgenerational trauma by utilizing building materials such as silicone, lumber, drywall, concrete, and hardware as symbols that represent his community in this country, one that lives alongside the dominant culture yet is distinctly separate.

As the grandson of a Curandera, a traditional medicine woman, and a practitioner of Curanderismo, Luis makes art that conjures indigenous spiritualities to embody personal histories, cultural resistance, and colonial disruption. He believes that in order to forge new identities, we must return to the ancestral source from which we are all forged: the human spirit.