Mónica Palma: Linea Alba

About

It’s all happening at once.
Mónica Palma is dislodging events from the socket of their circumstance.  She is tracking and sorting an order of occurrence, rhyming across time. 

 Her work flickers between object and event.  Performance leaves its traces and the drawings and sculpture plainly entail the process of their construction.  They pursue each other back and forth through the looking glass.  She makes drawings with her mouth that look like lines of hieroglyphs from an alternate evolution of language.  While performing, her songs are muddled by her own tongue.  She is licking the sticky ink that covers the window like tar, clearing it away to let small patches of light through.  The drawings and performance transpose each other.  You could fit them together like a puzzle.

 She spits. Ink she has mixed and chewed in her mouth, obsidian figurines made for tourists, clay molds of the inside of her mouth, charcoal into the little cakes she drops down to the ground from up in a tree.  She is a curandera spitting liquor onto her patient, she is spitting out blood or poison, spitting in someone’s face, spitting out your toothpaste; it echoes out.  Each component is encoded and set in relation.  The obsidian cast, like a gambler’s dice, like a shaman divining with kernels of corn.  Palma herself is left with her mouth blackened, a sin eater, a ritual impersonator of Xipe Totec, the Zapotec god, wearing the flayed skin of a sacrifice.  She is finding the roots of these things, these actions, beneath the particularities of incidence.

Mónica Palma has other motives, other aims besides the articulation or translation of meaning.  She is like a multidimensional tracker, collecting her materials, plotting her coordinates, enacting these occurrences, and sequencing a live circuit of correlates. On the street, in the trees, up against the window, and on the threshold, she generates a brief and dynamic equilibrium.

 Text by Jenny Nichols

Mónica Palma

Mónica Palma was born in Mexico City and studied visual art at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Veracruz.  She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University.  She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  Her work has been shown at TSA (NYC), 245 Varet Street (NYC), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City),  Soloway Gallery (NYC), Underdonk Gallery (NYC), and Essex Flowers (NYC).  She is currently a lecturer at SUNY Purchase in the department of Painting and Drawing.