Meredith Parent-Delgadillo
Concordia University
Meredith Parent-Delgadillo is currently exploring her Bolivian and Quebec origins and exploring the in-between of this duality through her work. By exploring the space between these two ways of being, she brings together the differences and similarities in her work, even if they contradict each other. Sometimes separate, sometimes together, these cultures come together and let themselves be in his sculptures and 2D works. This diversity leads to an intimate questioning of the appropriation of cultures, self-conflict, separation and identity.
She creates objects inspired by the classic representation of museums based on anthropological research, which illustrate the conflicts she faces, being part of two cultures that she is still learning to dissect. The true, the false, what is innate and what is transmitted, all converge in a chromatically and physically result that flows from reality.
Image 1– sculpture
Half full (or empty), wax, metal, wood, paper, fabric, acrylic, plastic, clay, 122,2x 120 x 50 cm (with pedestal) , 2021
Parent-Delgadillo uses dualism as a rhetorical strategy. The presentation of the pair – propped up on austere rods – evokes the standard presentation of ritual masks of indigenous cultures in anthropological museums across the western world. The use of lurid colours and a puerile expression is contrasted by the gaping torso and the loose entrails. The abject in these sculptures functions to position the figures at the boundary between living and inanimate, animal and human, benign and menacing.
Image 2-4 – photography and sculpture project (meant to be showed together)
Hold on to it, photography and pewter casting (dimensions of pewter casting are 8 x 6,2 x 3,7cm)
For this project, I thought about my own body and how I perceived it. So, I wanted to do something that could help visualize a situation more and more common into western world: miscegenation between two races, and children who are a product of those relationships sometimes face many problems dealing with their identity and finding the middle ground within their selves. Some repress totally a side because they seek acceptance of the society they live in, and, sometimes within those cases, their decision is linked with their appearances and how they are perceived physically. Me being really white looking and being half-Bolivian an half-Québécoise, an extension for me will be something showing physically that I am part Bolivian. I did a folkloric bear, use to be seen in carnival time in Bolivia. Being separated from my family for a long time now, I wanted a symbol as something traditionally happy to grab and place it on different parts of my body with its arms, legs and teeth, leaving marks behind on my skin.
Image 5 – Linocut print
Untiled, ink on Bristol paper (series to come), 17,6 x 27,9 cm
