Congratulations to Tatiana Parcero, whose early work, Cartografía Interior #35, 1996 has been accepted into the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. An honor for any artist, this news is especially meaningful for Parcero who studied in New York. The photograph was a gift of collector Helen Kornblum in honor of curator Roxana Marcoci. This work from Parcero’s Cartografia Interior series (1994-1996) was executed as the contemporary Mexican photographer was completing her education at New York University / International Center of Photography (NYU/ICP), New York (in 1995). The series was loaded and nuanced. This is a well recognized, even iconic sample of Tatiana Parcero’s (dual-layered) photographic work; it is also in the collection of the Davis Museum | Wellesley College and was included in Revolution and Ritual, a Pacific Standard Time (Getty initiative) exhibition presented by Scripps College Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery and appeared in the exhibition catalog.
Tatiana Parcero is now known for her practice and process of integrating appropriated imagery with photographs of her own body. Now a touchstone of her practice, this artwork was made in early days in the Artists’s evolution. The Cartografía Interior series began by integrating antique anatomical drawings of the human body with images of the Artist’s (generally fragmented) body and lead into incorporation of sections of Aztec codicies with the body, such as we see here in Cartografía Interior #35. While the exploration of identity began somewhat literally, to answer the question “what is under the skin, “ soon evolved. The Artist found harmony with the structure of the human anatomy and the landscape (veins look like rivers, skin can appear as the Earth’s crust), and explored deeper. She began to consider the contents of her own flesh and blood, its makings and history. Parcero has both Aztec and Spanish ancestry, thus a particularly complex relationship to the Codices she integrated with images of her body. Parcero’s Cartografía Interior works would be followed by Nuevo Mundo, a series which went a step further-out and drew on colonial and astrological maps and predominantly images of the artist’s pregnant torso (such as Nuevo Mundo #17). Each subsequent study solidified the Artist’s concerns with mapping identity through the body. Tatiana Parcero’s oeuvre has proved to be a visual meditation of the physiological and spiritual connection to the universe. Each image working in harmony often achieved through subtly varied repetition. Revising imagery of the body adds a spiritual aspect, not redundancy. While focused on the singular (her body), Parcero has also managed to establish a symbolism via that “self-unit” that speaks to the universal.