October
Borderlines: Finding Common Ground
by Claire Voon
This month’s residency was generously sponsored by the Shepard Broad Foundation.
For thirty minutes on an October morning, Eriko Tsogo sat on a Miami beach, ironing sand as water washed over and away with the grains. “It’s my way to introduce myself to new surroundings, and the surroundings to me,” she recalls. “I was trying to perfect what’s imperfect.” This gesture of acclimating, of responding to ever-shifting, unpredictable circumstances with the goal of betterment, is an apt metaphor for the immigrant experience in the United States; a process in which individuals, while marking their paths, often assimilate to survive. Tsogo, Jessica Alazraki, and Leasho Johnson, artists in the Our Stories Unite Us Fountainhead Residency, were all born outside the U.S., and their practices reflect such feelings of othering and belonging. Being in this new setting recalibrated their creative energies and gave them room to further explore how to use art to unapologetically occupy space, rendering boundless worlds for themselves and their respective communities.
As Tsogo got comfortable in her studio, she used chalk, spit, and blood to transfer traces of her body onto paper, and integrated local materials like palm leaves and avocado seeds. The abstract prints became backgrounds for new works in her series “Wrong Woman, Myths from the Sky,” in which she draws figures in metaphysical spaces and states of turmoil.
“It’s about healing your trauma,” Tsogo says. “There’s pain in the work that is very violent.”
Born in Mongolia into a family of herdsmen, and living in Colorado as a DACA recipient, Tsogo has long explored how physical displacement affects one’s ontological place in the world—one’s sense of self. Through drawings, paintings, performances, and animations, she merges visions of what she describes as “my mindscape Mongolia, a utopia existing in my head” with Mongol mythology and representations of her diasporic reality. Wrong Woman, in its simultaneous abstraction and specificity of site and self, captures this sense of reaching for what one innately knows but has lost. “I’m on a search to find myself,” Tsogo says. “I long for my culture, but I also want to feel needed by the geography I choose to call home.”
In her own paintings, Mexico City–born Alazraki aspires to nurture such sentiments of belonging, specifically for Latinx immigrants. These colorful, pattern-filled portraits show Latinx families at home, around a table, or lounging on a couch, the environments merging photographs and imagined scenes. Alazraki’s intentions are simple but pointed: “My work is a celebration of culture,” she says. “I don’t victimize the characters, and I don’t put them in a place of power.” For her, any backstories are best left outside the frame; the point is to commemorate a shared triumph of building a life in another land. “I don’t want to deal with politics in a confrontational way. We are here, and this is us.”
Alazraki usually paints in her home studio in New York. In Miami, away from her domestic space, the different scenery motivated her to try something new. She experimented with a darker palette and finished two large-scale paintings of children and adults conducting everyday activities: brushing their teeth, texting, making art. In one, she included a portrait by Mariano Rodríguez that she saw at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the patterns of the woman’s hat complementing Alazraki’s bright designs on an ottoman and carpet. “I use photographic references, but I make them my own in the canvas,” she says. “I’m going for a collage aesthetic and trying to paint everyone to highlight the different personalities.”
Alazraki adds that Miami offered her a feeling of familiarity because she saw many Latinx residents. The city also has a large Caribbean population, which in part drew Leasho Johnson to it. He spent time with Caribbean writers and poets, including the historian and curator Erica Moiah James and poet Kai Miller, whose disciplines have nourished his practice. “I’m dealing with subject matters like identity and post-coloniality, and art becomes a way beyond language to talk about that,” Johnson says.
Born in Jamaica, Johnson makes works influenced by the transformative culture of dancehall. Merging dramatic charcoal and paint, they show figures as contorted or abstracted, complicating notions of masculinity and Blackness. In Miami, Johnson worked on pieces for an upcoming exhibition, whose title “Love of Men and the Fear of Stones” references a poem by Miller. One recasts an image Johnson saw of a cartoon wolf in a skirt. For him, this predator-like character demonstrates how pop culture perpetuates stereotypes of queer people: it “captures how people look at trans people. The body’s betraying the mind, or the mind’s betraying the body.” The work also wrestles with his upbringing in Jamaica, where religious and societal values can shake one’s self-worth. “Being gay, it’s an extra degree of losing your humanity,” he says. Energetic and elusive, his art suggests the freedom the dance floor offers while holding anxieties around codes of conduct.
During his time at Fountainhead, Johnson posed the question: “What makes me so alien?” His phrasing employed the legal term used to describe non-U.S. citizens while othering and denigrating them. In their self-reflexive practices, the three resident artists hone in on cultures that set them apart. There may be injustices, explicit or implied, underlying their narratives, but they are ultimately authors of their own lives, asserting the power of their truths.
Jessica
Alazraki
As a Mexican woman living in New York City, Jessica Alazraki feels a responsibility to open a dialogue about immigration. Her work intends to bring Latinx life into contemporary art by celebrating the culture. The narrative shows scenes of ordinary life that highlight family values.
Bright colors and decorative patterns are characteristic of her works; in her oil paintings, portraits are always in the foreground and close to the viewer. Composition and color are prominent in the pictures, as she opts for the placement of the elements versus the realistic quality of the form. Alazraki intends to break traditional viewing rules and create unpredictable images with intense brushwork that provides unique character, combined with texture and flat backgrounds to highlight emotion. Her work was recently exhibited at Marianne Boesky, the Black Wall Street Gallery, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, among others. She was born in Mexico City and currently lives and works in New York City.
Clockwise from left: A portrait of Jessica Alazraki in her studio at Fountainhead Residency by Carl Juste; Brushing Hair in Pink, 2021. Oil on canvas; Alazraki working in her studio at Fountainhead by Francesca Nabors; Beach, 2022. Oil on canvas.
Leasho Johnson
Leasho Johnson is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. He uses his experience growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity within the post-colonial condition of Jamaican Dancehall street culture. Working at the conjunction of painting and drawing, Johnson makes characters that live on the edge of perception, visible and invisible at the same time. His work lives to disrupt historical, political, and biological expectations of the Black queer body.
Johnson is currently a fellow of the Jamaica Art Society. He was a Leslie Lohman Museum fellow for 2021 and a recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship from the School of Art Institute Chicago (SAIC) 2018 - 2020. He has shown his work in his home country at several National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions and has exhibited in Canada, France, and Brazil, among others. He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson is currently based in Chicago, where he works and lectures at the School of Art Institute Chicago.
Clockwise from left: A photo of Leasho Johnson working by Francesca Nabors; A portrait of Leasho Johnson in his studio at Fountainhead Residency by Carl Juste; A portrait of Leasho Johnson working in his studio at Fountainhead Residency by Francesca Nabors; work in progress in Leasho Johnson’s studio at Fountainhead Residency by Francesca Nabors.
Eriko
Tsogo
Eriko Tsogo is a Mongolian-American multidisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural producer working between the spectrums of fine art, social practice, and media justice. Her identity as a first-generation Mongolian-American woman, immigrant, and artist creates duality where opposing social values and spiritual norms of Eastern and Western cultures constantly clash and fuse. She is interested in expressing the embattled emotional middle space of this marginal identity, be/longing, and the meaning of home. She seeks to present a holistic visual guide on how one can remedy the soul to resilience and authentic personal self-empowerment.
In her social practice work, she generates a forum that inspires, challenges, and creates understanding and dialogue about equity, diversity, and inclusivity through the power of art and culture. She is passionate about social justice and civic engagement through the arts and utilizes art as a catalyst to help educate and empower marginalized and underrepresented communities. Tsogo’s work has been exhibited in venues across Denver, Los Angeles, and Boston. She was born in Mongolia, and currently lives and works in Denver, CO.
Clockwise from left: FORBIDDEN FRUIT, 2022. Mechanical pencil and graphite powder on paper; A portrait of Eriko Tsogo in her studio at Fountainhead Residency by Carl Juste; THE MARRIAGE, 2022. Gel pen, mechanical pencil, and paint marker on paper; A photo of Eriko Tsogo using a toy water gun to create work in her studio at Fountainhead Residency by Francesca Nabors.
Alazraki, Watching Stars, 2022. Oil on canvas.
Alazraki, Last supper, 2022. Oil on canvas. Photo credit Bleu Pablo.
Alazraki, Kids with lollipops, 2022. Oil on canvas.
Johnson, The subjection of brother snake (Anansi #10), 2021. Charcoal, watercolor, distemper, logwood dye, coffee, oil, collage, and gesso on paper mounted on canvas.
Johnson, Shut you mouth....with you little bit a money, 2022. Charcoal, watercolor, distemper, logwood dye, indigo dye, oil, oil stick, collage, and gesso on paper mounted on canvas.
Johnson, Anansi and the river maiden (Anansi #16), 2022. Charcoal, watercolor, distemper, indigo dye, logwood dye, oil, collage, and gesso on paper mounted on canvas.
Tsogo, EPICANTHIC FOLD, 2022. Mechanical pencil, colored pencil, paint marker, and gel pen on cutout paper.
Tsogo, SHADOW DANCE, 2022. Mechanical pencil, gel pen, and graphite powder on paper.
Tsogo, AMERICAN ME, 2022. Mechanical pencil, gel pen, and digital collage on paper.