Artist statement: sioux trujillo

In my current body of work I utilize a number of different mediums including wax, graphite, paper, Mylar, encaustic paint, cloth material, thread, advertising from retail magazines and cotton. During the past 5 years I have worked with progressive intention on this body of work to develop my personal visual language. Subtlety and Nuance are very important to my work because of the way I think the brain “sees” what is not there. This allows the viewer to experience the seductive, low tech, haptic nature of my drawings at a pre-industrial pace. I use the machine-sewn line as a symbol for industrialized labor. This idea of labor is explored on multiple levels in my work: The labor of the artist creating the piece through repetition and obsessive construction, the labor that goes into the manufacturing of the raw materials and the sociological role of labor in a contemporary context.

My integration of human made material and organic materials asks the viewer to decide what is natural and what is human made. My constructions are intended to calm the viewer with their familiar horizontal compositional references to tradional landscape painting and ancient sacred geometry but simultaneously references aggression by my destructive manipulation of materials.

I believe that viewing works of art should call for attention and patience, as they push the bodily act of consumption into the mental act of contemplation. Visual art does not unfold in history like a film or a book:  It exists all at once.  Having no rate of consumption, it throws the viewer back to her own rhythms (or lack thereof), while the act of viewing gives no outward sign of comparison.