This early work by artist Tatiana Parcero is a striking sample that addresses the artist’s central themes: identity and mapping. Parcero integrates self portraits and appropriated images to understand her place in the universe. Her use of the self implicates the personal, the singular unit, but works simultaneously to evolve the body as a symbol: one of many. Appropriated images too work harmoniously and meditatively through Parcero’s practice to reference personal, literal, and ultimately universal themes.
Parcero has both Native Amerindian and Spanish ancestry and has said that work of this period grew from a feeling of “feeling conflicted in my own skin.” This work followed her Cartografía Interior | Interior Cartographies series which integrating the figure and antique anatomical drawings. A literal mapping became an ancestral quest. The choice to use a colonial map over her pregnant body is a powerful and loaded choice. It references a personal horizon of becoming a mother as well as implicates the intercontinental intergenerational impact of colonization. From here, the artist would go on to bring astrological drawings with zodiac symbols, celestial maps, chemical constructions, and naturalist style drawings into her work.
Nuevo Mundo #17 was included in Scripps College’s contribution to the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: La/LA exhibition: Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero and appears in the exhibition catalog.
Tatiana Parcero | Nuevo Mundo #17 | Editions of 10 | (dual-layered) Pigment Prints on Cotton Paper & Acetate | available in 27x16 in. from $8,500