" It’s the unsaid stories that raised me. My family seems to live between parentheticals, between hushed up identities, and tucked-away family histories. In this piece, I use iconography of the Virgen de Guadalupe in Chicana art and in family altars to feel through the shape of these parentheticals. It is Our Lady of Guadalupe after all that is perhaps one of the most recognized elisions of indigeneity and female desire in the pantheon of the gods. But she is also the ultimate trickster, used in Chicana art to represent a possibility that we can live with, in, besides, and outside of the parentheticals as we choose. Her shape is also the shade of a
“heddle” on a weaving loom (two stretched semi-circles meeting at the tips). The heddle is what allows fabric to be woven as it lifts individual strings. Normally the heddle only has one hole. This lady has two. " - Kira Dominguez Hultgren