Tatiana Parcero
Ossis Naturam Corporis

Tatiana Parcero - Ossis Naturam Corporis

Mexican-born, Argentinian-based contemporary artist, Tatiana Parcero’s works unfold like a slow meditation. Hers is a study on our place in and connection to the universe and the eternal. Her work gains meaning through visual repetition and symbolic harmony. Parcero’s images nearly always include herself, her body, which she has treated specifically/personally, yet also evolved as a symbol for the singular human-unit.

Tatiana Parcero’s work navigates themes of identity, ritual, mapping, and intersects them with the body. The study of the subject continues in Ossis Naturam Corporis where Parcero considers the body as a site for memory of time. Parcero began working with bones after being invited to join an initiative Ayotzinapa 43 + 1 and make artwork in reaction to the 2014 disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students in Guerrero, Mexico.

Parcero has been known for using space to consider volume. Absence to consider presence. This was true in the dual-layered works she produced early in her career, where prints on transparency and prints on cotton paper create a sense of volume when mounted with a space between. There, the clear aspect of the print allowed light to pass through and cast shadows on the print laying below. Here, bones- the aperture of the body are presented absent of flesh and form. They are not, however void of spirit, rather act as“testimony of the last tangible form of existence.” Held-up by the Artist’s hands and presented as an offering before her own body in what feels like a sacred act. The scene is adorned with naturalist-style drawings appropriated from works by (biologist, naturalist, zoologist, ecologist) Ernst Hackel. These shapes are soft and seem to burst from the bones and float through our visual field. What Parcero reveals in this work is the connection between life and death. One springs from the other, each are composed of the other. The body is made of water, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. Though we (living) may mourn the passage of spirit that inhabits the body-vessel, it is remembered forever in the elements from which it is composed. While we may remember those gone through what remains, what we are of is everlasting and immortal, gaining energy and history through transition.