Tessie Salcido Whitmore
Tessie Salcido Whitmore (b. 1969, El Monte, CA) received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University, in 2012 and her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach, in 2009. She was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, in 2015, and was the recipient of the OC Art Grant, in 2012 and the Albert B. Friedman Grant Award, in 2011. Recent shows include Two Rooms, La Jolla; Other Places Art Fair 2020, online at OPaf.info and Swish Projects; a solo project, I Rang a Silent Bell at Art Produce Gallery; A Show about Touching at Bread and Salt Gallery; Material Matters: 5th SUR: Biennial, Torrance Art Museum; Magick is Afoot at Arvia Los Angeles; Parallels to a Fictional Universe, L’oiseau présente and Botschaft, for B-LA Connect, Berlin, Germany; High Key: Color in Southern California at San Diego Art Institute; Bitter Candy at Vermont Studio Center, Gallery II; Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market, organized by Los Angeles Nomadic Division; and Floor Flowers, curated by David Pagel, Claremont Graduate University.
My work is about identity, hidden and discovered. My aesthetic choices are influenced by my time on the road following the Grateful Dead; California counter-culture; my childhood spent in a matriarchal household of New Age holistic health, philosophies, and religion; and being mixed race. I explore this through the act of collecting and letting materials come together in odd ways. Using quotidian materials, such as found objects, 99-cent store colorful seasonal items, and common household goods, I am is interested in finding a mystical sense in the mundane. I create installations, sculptures, and photographs that use a lens of pop and counter-culture to investigate representations of women, domesticity, the other, and New Age religion.
As a trained painter, I challenge my own notions of artmaking, pushing boundaries of what materials can be viewed as art objects. I am constantly scanning the territory of the banal, inclusivity being my goal. As a mixed race, Aries, Gen-X, woman over the age of 50, aka over the hill, I face the challenges of bias, stigma, and the confines of culture. I seek vengeance through girly color palettes, child-like playfulness, and forced absurdity. Leveraging the importance of communication over commodity, I see my art practice embedded in the rules of rule breaking. My works are vulnerable to destruction, taking on the risks of failure as they precariously levitate, coquettishly lie on the floor and teeter on the edge.