Sign of the Times at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts

Sign of the Times is a two-person exhibition at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts, August 16 – October 4, 2019. My artworks in this exhibition reflect the theme of gender-based burdens. Gender-based burdens plague women regardless of class, ethnicity, culture, religion, geographical location or sexuality. Within the societal stratification, burdens that impact women disproportionally include poverty, violence and political inequity. This weight hauled by women can have a palpable physical existence or take on a psychological shape of enormous proportions. Many women live day-to-day hindered by gender-based burdens; yet, they continue to persist.

I created wall drawings for this exhibition August 12 – 15, 2019. The title for the series of wall drawings is “You’re Not Angry, You’re Not Paying Attention”. The wall drawing is created with conte and has specialty fabric accents.

1Meza-DesPlas_Wall Installation_Fitton Center2Meza-DesPlas_Wall 1_Fitton Center3Meza-DesPlas_Wall 2 and 3_Fitton Center5Meza-DesPlas_Detail 1_Fitton Center6Meza-DesPlas_Detail 2_Fitton CenterMeza-DesPlas_Detail Fourth WallMeza-DesPlas_Wall Installation in Progress

4Meza-DesPlas_Wall 4_Fitton CenterMeza-DesPlas_Detail Middle Section - Copy

 

Author: rosemarymezadesplas

“I was born and raised in Garland, Texas; a manufacturing-based suburb of Dallas. My parents’ heritage is rooted south of the US border: my mother was born in Allende located in Coahuila, Mexico. My father, born in Santa Maria, Texas, grew up in Tampico situated within Tamaulipas, Mexico. The tenacity of my eight aunts in the face of personal tragedies and adversities was an early inspiration; their narratives contributed to my embrace of feminist ideology.” Rosemary Meza-DesPlas currently lives in Farmington, New Mexico. The cornerstone of her artwork is the female experience within a patriarchal society. As a woman, daily navigation of our world is a precarious tight-rope walk. The use of portraiture to discuss gender-based burdens personalizes the political. Intricate drawings are created by meticulous stitching of human hair. The dichotomy of human hair, depending upon context, is it can be engaging or off-putting: long, luxurious hair is sexy, but a hair in one’s soup is unappealing. Meza-DesPlas seduces the viewer with elegant, sensual marks of hair. Thematically, her artworks advocate for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Through on-site drawing installations and watercolor paintings, Meza-DesPlas evokes intellectual and visceral responses to socio-cultural burdens endured by women; these burdens and their subsequent impact on contemporary culture are interpreted through a global lens. She earned a MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art (Hoffberger School of Painting) and a BFA from the University of North Texas. Her artwork has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Her work has been written about in several publications including the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, The Durango Herald, Wall Street International, and Interview Magazine. Ms. Meza-DesPlas parallels the themes in her visual artwork with the written word and spoken word performances.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: