Jacqueline Arias

Presenting:

Mola Truth Maps is a collaboration with Rosa Lidia Alba and her sisters that explores molas, traditional quilt designs crafted by indigenous Guna women in Panama. Through video, data-visualization, virtual reality, sculpture and works on paper, the molas are activated as visual and aural maps – lived maps – capturing the experiences of the Guna people and Arias’s personal history. Google Earth elevation charts symbolize time and displacement on nontraditional maps, serving as a visual thread that weaves through the works across media. This storytelling line, representing knowledge-building, resists, subverts and protects.

Arias’s work examines the materiality of the Mola quilts, which serve as apotropaic devices, traditionally worn for protection. The reverse applique layers of fabric form a spiritual labyrinth, designed to repel and trap evil spirits. The sculptural textiles and the VR elements are reimagined as expressions of indigenous power, embodying indigenous cosmology.

Bio:

Jacqueline Arias was born in Costa Rica and raised in southern Ohio. This varied geographical and cultural history has inspired a body of work that combines experimental video, sculpture, new media practices, data visualizations and AI technologies to construct alternative historiographies that address Latinx geopolitical issues around migration and family separation. Arias is an independent director of a feature length documentary film, Imaginary Mothers that was screened at the 2017 Golden Door International Film Festival and at the Adoption Initiative 2018 biennial conference. In 2018, Arias was awarded a seed grant from Women In Film and Video DC. Arias has been invited to speak about her work and activism at Nogales Museum, Mexico and Loyola University, Maryland. In 2022, Jacqueline was awarded a Border Lab Graduate Fellowship from the Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona. Her work was recently selected for the 2024 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art.

Arias holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art/Photography, Video & Imaging at the University of Arizona and a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Parsons School of Design in NYC. Arias currently serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Arizona, College of Information Science.

http://jacquelinearias.com