Liliana Conlisk Gallegos and Juan Carlos Portillo, Cory Scott McCormick. Juried Artist
Constellations
Artist Statement
The Coyolxauhqui Imperative 2020 is the first example of no-muralismo, or artisanal rasquache immersive muralism. This audiovisual, pre-Hispanic history-based VR piece combines research, artistic repurposing, and spoken word in Spanglish and Nahuatl to honor and visualize the experiences of Indigenous and Latinx women of the Americas, offering a decolonial retelling of womanhood in Mexico and the United States while addressing European colonialism, US imperialism, and globalization.
The project features three archetypes of womanhood from Mexican and Xicanx mythopoetics: “La Malinche” (The traitor), “La Llorona” (The weeper), and “La Chingada” (The victim). Using TiltBrush in VR, I designed a virtual world with dialogues between my analogue paintings, digital interventions on Mexican murals, and digitized excerpts from pre-Hispanic Mexica-Tenochca codices. Theoretically, it explores mythopoetic representations of womanhood, Xicanx queer feminism, and my cosmovision as a transfronteriza, Xicanx artist with Southern and Baja Californian Indigenous ancestry from the Tijuana border.
The project invites users to engage in multiple dialogues depending on the accompanying audio, reinforcing the importance of Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “the Coyolxauhqui imperative” and the freedom of diversity and inclusion in identity-based experiences.
About the artists
Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Dr. Machete, or Mystic Machete is a first-generation scholar from the Tijuana-San Diego border region. Her mission is to advance the decolonial turn through immersive transborder new media art, reuniting Chicana/o/x “Mestiza” and various facets of Indigenous wisdom and fragmentary memory with technology. With a perpetual border-crossing perspective, she amplifies individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice. She curates community-centered multimedia artivism, exhibits globally, and contributes pieces of decolonial theory and methodologies to academic journals across various disciplines. She is Professor of Media and Communication at CSU San Bernardino, member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee, and was credited for no-muralismo rasquache artisanal VR world making or Xicanx-Transfronteriza Immersive Muralism in the recent 2023 ACM SIGGRAPH Autodesk 50th anniversary time tunnel exhibition.
https://www.csusb.edu/profile/liliana.gallegos
Music by Juan Carlos Portillo and Cory McCormick.
Juan Carlos Portillo is a musical producer musician, arranger, and composer. He is an expert in experimentation with electronic and ethnic/pre-Hispanic instruments.
Cory Scott McCormick grew up in Rialto, Ca. After a decade of various music projects, Cory founded The Man in the Bottle in 2016. The name is a reference to the Twilight Zone. The Man in the Bottle is a project centered around growth, emotional honesty, and questioning everything.
Credits: Liliana Conlisk Gallegos with music by Juan Carlos Portillo and Cory Scott McCormick