Patricia Dominguez     (from United States / America)
HEARING

Patricia Dominguez is a visual artist and naturalist. She was born in Santiago Chile in 1984 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is based in exploring the relationship between contemporary cultures to nature. She has a multidisciplinary approach towards her work as she utilizes video, installation, scientific drawing, photography and site-interventions. She studied Visual Arts at PUC, Santiago, Chile (2007) a MFA at Hunter College in Combined Media (2013) and Botanical and Natural Science Illustration at the New York Botanical Garden (2011). Patricia has participated in artist residencies such as “The Watermill Center” (NY, 2011); “American Museum of Natural History” (NY, 2011); “Sandbard Artist Residency” (India, 2012) and “The Institute of Critical Zoologists” (Singapore, 2012).
Her work has been included in publications such as “Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory” (2009) by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and Phaidon Press, and in “Sub 30; Pintura en Chile” (2013) among others. She was awarded Conicyt Scholarship (2010), “Fondart” Grant (2013 and 2010) and “William Graft Travel Grant” (2012). Her main projects have been presented in La Bienal: HERE IS WHERE WE JUMP at El Museo del Barrio, “Historias de Objetos" curated by Jose Roca at Gabriela Mistral Gallery in Santiago, Chile and “11va Bienal de Artes Mediales” Museo Bellas Artes, Chile.
STATEMENT
Exploring the relationship of contemporary cultures to nature is a central focus of my work. I trace, modify, and imagine the genealogy between humans and other living beings in the 21st Century. A genealogy that does not mean tracing linear descents, but the images, categories, and proximities used to convey them nowadays. I am interested in transforming these processes of construction in order to create a space where notions of the non-human can be open to zones of indetermination and re-thinking the current cosmologies that have been built around the living.
My multidisciplinary approaches respond to the entanglement of the living combined with ethnographic, anthropological, geographical, economical and mythological processes that are involved in these entanglements. My fictional approach and imaginative operations are not contained by hegemonic knowledge in order to allow new associations and proximities.
“As an avid reader and lucid interpreter of texts about the cultural construction we call Natural History, Patricia Dominguez had a moment of epiphany when she realized that her own thinking about the natural had been unconsciously apprehended along with her training as a social being, and what she actually was interested in was in establishing relationships with the living. In this sense, the distinction between nature and culture is relative, because what we call nature is overdetermined by anthropocentric views, even environmental approaches that see nature as a collateral damage of development”.
José Roca, Curator

www.patriciadominguez.com