NOME is pleased to announce Of Daughters and Dreams, a solo exhibition by the artist Priscilla Dobler Dzul. Her paintings, sculpture, video, and performance works have addressed notions of belonging, borders, alienation, and social inequality as they relate to the history of migration and indigenous cultures. Her most recent works comprise large-scale paintings, tapestries, and glazed, painted sculptures inspired by the bold colors and forms of Mayan mythological oral stories and Alebrije folk art that represent all elements of life: air, water, earth, and fire.
Her ebullient canvases depict expansive landscapes featuring a range of hybrid animals, human figures, and plant life. These invented worlds teem with dreamlike visions, sensual pleasures, collisions of different life forms and genders—yet many of these tableaux nonetheless bristle with an undercurrent of darkness: brutality, violence, death, and turbulent transformations. Paraíso Perdido depicts a paradise of sexual pleasure, boxing, and struggle for reproductive rights with the jaguar goddess overseeing it all. In Jaguar Protector, sueños demoníacos, a three-headed woman encroaches upon a reclining nude figure protected by a jaguar with a snake protruding from its mouth. Inspired by recurring dreams, the painting seeks new forms for ancestors who have had their stories, bodies, and voices erased to speak in the present and future. Her highly glazed clay sculptures introduce fantastical creatures who live between worlds—between the ancient and contemporary, animal and human.
Donna Haraway describes a trickster figure as someone “that might turn a stacked deck into a potent set of wild cards for refiguring possible worlds.” Dobler Dzul adopts the literary and mythic device of the trickster in her multi-media works to address the violence, segregation, and cultural erasure that threatens indigenous Latinx identity and knowledge. The figures that appear in her works are boundary crossers set on disrupting intersecting forms of oppression with their pleasurable, playful games.
THE MAYANIST: THE ART OF PRISCILLA DOBLER DZUL
Much of what we imagine of the Mayan civilization is based on glyphs, abandoned pyramids in Mesoamerica, and fresco paintings of plummed and godly personas. We imagine a colorful world thriving centuries ago before colonization. Much of what we learn from this Mayan culture is through stagnant mediums: historical books written by white authors, museum collections curated by Western curators, academic courses taught in lecture settings. We peer from a distance and back into time. But Mayan civilization is still alive and still thriving. What is missed is that although huge empires have been replaced by modern cities, the Mayan people are bound by their culture and customs, many of which had to endure violence, oppression, and erasure at the hands of European colonizers, Catholic and Christian conversion in Mexico, and through time—migration, displacement, poverty, and the struggle to maintain their indigenous practices.
When you enter Nome Gallery and the exhibit of artist Priscilla Dobler Dzul, you are confronting an ancient culture that is still very much alive, active, evolving, grounded in their traditions, and generating new ones. As an interdisciplinary artist born in Merida, Mexico and raised in the United States, Dobler Dzul is perfectly situated to probe how identity is constructed in a globalized society and to challenge gender roles and cultural structures. The show vibrantly displays Dobler Dzul’s penchant for craft and fine art by blurring the lines between the two. She is upholding her deep Mexican heritage and casting light on mediums that aren’t always placed on pedestals.
For this exhibit, Dobler Dzul has created a contemporary Mayan codex through painting, sculpture, and textile works. What you see in the work Of Daughters and Dreams is a deep veneration in origin making and a commentary on cultural erasure. Dobler Dzul’s work is not necessarily autobiographical but the works build upon the personal in body politics, sexual identity, gender representation, and cultural heirachies. Through the notion of conception, she is birthing new characters and narratives as an indigenous and queer Latinx artist.
She writes, “I create hybrid mythological artwork to address socio-political issues in a playful, feminine, sexual way while reshaping and disrupting structures of misogyny, whiteness, indigeneity, and labor.”
In her works, she is focused on how objects came to be and are used. She works to establish a reciprocal relationship to the earth and the many modes of artistry she takes on. The materials she selects are important to her practice, the colors and how they came to be developed over time have agency, and the personas she is crafting come to her through oral stories from her community in the Yucatan or through dreamstates.
As part of her practice, the artist asks questions to move the themes in her work forward. In this way, the works move beyond the personal and become societal probes. In the creation of objects as representation, Dobler Dzul questions the intentionality of making for consumption. Her making is ritualized and a practice of spirituality and upholding family legacies.
Dobler Dzul references the atrocities made by the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa against the Mayan religion and civilization in the Yucatan as a motivation to make new Mayan works. Around 1562, he burned most of the Mayan manuscripts that served to mark the Mayan history and culture. In turn, he became the singular author on the Mayan civilization, writing the only reference book on what we know of the Mayas. This body of work is a direct response to that loss and erasure. How would Mayan culture be experienced differently if those codices and idols hadn’t been destroyed? How different would we experience Mayan culture if those codices endured and weren’t replaced by a colonizer lens and written from a male gaze? Diego de Landa infantilized the Mayan practices and deemed them as evil. What if they survived and the Mayan gods that took on the properties of animals still existed to demark power, poise, and grace?
As a Mexican-American, the artworks of Dobler Dzul allow for me to imagine a world where our indigenous histories can co-exist alongside our European roots. And they not only exist but are measured and valued by the same merits. Through her practice and through her own mixed-identity, she poignantly pulls just as easily from Renaissance paintings as Mayan stelae from Scottish folklore to Mexican artesania. Rather than focus on oppression, she celebrates liberation in all its forms. This reframing of indigenous knowledge and art created to signal resilience is an empowering reminder that we can take control of our narratives as people of color and be shepherds for new generations of global indigeneity.
Marina Garcia-Vasquez
