Oregon Contemporary Art Center
Edgar Fabian Frias
Curator, Justin Hoover
February 2 - March 8, 2019
Drawing on the artist’s indigenous, queer, pagan, witchy, mutagenic, and chimerica identities this installation features new and existing work including digital prints, custom-designed ready-made objects in the form of shower curtains and pillows, video projection and screen-based video. The title of the exhibition is based around the concept of The Nierika, a sacred woven portal also known as "Ojo de Dios" in Spanish or Eye of God in English. This sacred object has been used by the Wixarika people as an amulet, talisman and tool for accessing spiritual magic. The Nierika expresses the idea of integration and a “binding together”. For the artist it represents not only how we are linked to a larger world through ecology, community, and spirituality but also how diverse hybridities are bound within the self. The Nierika therefor is not only a portal, an offering and a place of respite but also a totem for a hybridized spirituality fusing self-fashioned identities in visual art, self- care and consciousness evolution. It is the core of the journey and the icon of self-discovery.
Visual motifs used in this body of work include the artist’s own body, as well as sacred animals, and shamanic figures, but also includes clowns, aliens and mutigenic figures. This engagement with otherness focuses on characters that have slippery meanings. The clown/alien/zombie imagery speaks to the ability to traverse multiple spaces simultaneously. Frías uses these images as they trigger a sense of cognitive dissonance, occupying a space both of fun and joviality but with underlying issues relating to fear, the abject and to horror. Like the depiction of the shaman or the witch, these works seek to bring up images that cause us cognitive dissonance and to use them to reshaping narratives around religion, spirituality and polymorphic identity.
About the artist: Edgar Fabián Frías, MA MFT is a Licensed Medical and Family Therapist (LMFT) who identifies as nonbinary, queer, indigenous (Wixárika) and Latinx interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and psychotherapist. A certified and licensed therapist, their work traverses academic, social, historical, and relational planes, building bridges and weaving webs. Their practice is amorphous and expansive, rooted in multivalent forms of connection and in the magic that emerges from it. Born in East Los Angeles, Frías earned dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio art from the University of California, Riverside and completed an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon and has studied inter-personal neurobiology with Dan Siegal. Consequently, Frías’ work is often collaborative and engages with interpersonal aspects of consciousness and the continuing effects of colonial and patriarchal structures on the health and resiliency of marginalized communities. Their work has been shown at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Vincent Price Art Museum, Human Resources, Machine Project, SOMArts, ESMoA, Recess Gallery, Pieter Performance Space, and PAM Residencies. Frías is currently participating in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship