The Exorcism of KCF
I’m working on an artist statement related to my Kitchen Saints that will be hosted soon on an online space connected to a larger project where I am exploring Latinx foodways in my rural Minnesota county. Today, I share some preliminarily thoughts on how I’ve been exploring Kitchen Saints I worked on the series, and in the context of my broader artistic goals. Consider this a little bts (behind the scenes) on how I work on my series artist statements and how I focus on a series approach for my paintings.
The painting you see here, St. Tajín of the Borderlands is the eleventh of thirteen explorations of the sauces that spice up our lives. I’ve been working on this series for the last year or so, the idea popped into my head after seeing one of the first paintings I made in the home of an IG friend who traded me a book for it. She had the painted bottle of Valentina hot sauce artfully arranged at the top of a peg board holding her pots and pans collection. I don’t know if I used the words at the time, but I saw that arrangement of the painting with the pots and pans and thought, wow, that hot sauce bottle is like the patron saint of the kitchen. As soon as I thought that, I began imagining what hot sauce bottles as saints would look like, and then began thinking about why I would want to make them.
I was raised Catholic. Saints have been a part of my life since taking first communion, and attending Catechism which began when I was five and continued through high school. Catechism was another educational site where I got to play teacher’s pet. I would love being first to recall the lessons, or to share loudly what the moral of the the story was whilst shaping pretzel dough for Lent, or putting my shoes out for candy in December. I liked singing and was a part of the youth choir. I had my group of friends at the church who I didn’t go to school with, so it was novel to learn about their lives that seemed so different from my private school education that shaped my middle-school and high school experiences. My friend Jennifer was a gorgeous Chola chingona and wow, I loved everything about her. St. Bernadette’s Parish in Albuquerque was a home for me. Dare I even say, a sanctuary. It was the site of so much learning about the world, about class, about race, about identity, and culture. And of course, gender. It was where I first fell in love with La Virgen de Guadalupe. Outside of my Abuela's home, it's where I felt most brown. It was also, outside of my family home, the site where notions about who could and could not have authority and power connected directly to one’s presumed biology. It was a site where limits were clearly defined. As so many young, curious, ambitious girls relate, we made friends with the nuns, and dreamt of our future possibilities of becoming one. It was where we idealized and concocted a romance of the convent, and where we conducted thought exercises of devoting our lives to God and the church. It was the first time I can recall hitting that wall of, no, that is not for you, when asking why women couldn’t be priests. A clear, no. A limit because of my gender.
So much of Western art history is rooted in the Catholic Church. Rome serves as such an important point in time for the rise and fall of architectural marvels (like concrete), and civilizations (hello empire). But if not for the Catholic Church, the Western art history arc would be vastly different. The Catholic Church was a patron of the arts acquiring biblical scenes represented in the frescos within churches and other holy sites. Relics crafted by artisans and shrines of religiously significant icons were the drivers of tourism where people would make pilgrimage to touch or be near. Clearly lasting the test of time, Catholics still have the commitment to create sites of worship through constructing churches worthy of a visit from god that truly are marvelously decadent places that inspire wonder and awe. From this rich history of Catholicism’s patronage of the arts, I salvaged wood boards for the sites of these paintings. Alluding to history of wood as it emerged via altarpieces, and to nod to the lineage of carved sculptures of Spain that traveled to the US via Spanish colonialism that ultimately merged into the retablo paintings of Northern Mexico and the US Southwest. Growing up in Albuquerque, and in the Catholic Church, saintly iconography was my visual home. These visuals were my first opportunities to recognize art as something powerful.
When I gave up on my dreams of becoming a nun, it was about the same time as I started wondering if the church had a place for me. As a feminist concerned about women’s reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy and desire for gender equality, the Catholic Church’s stance on those topics (at the time of my coming of age) directly conflicted with what I came to believe were integral to who I was as a person, of who I wanted to be in the world. This became even more complicated for me when I embraced my queer identity. LGBTQ people are not inherently banned from the building, but they’re not welcome as full people. I’ve found that for me, to be queer in the church, one has to give up a part of yourself to be a part of something else. “Love the sinner, but hate the sin” is a delicate balance that cannot function in an institution bent on upholding hierarchies that inevitably create a who is fully allowed in and who is not allowed fully into the faith.
“Is it sacrilegious for me to make these hot sauces into saints,” I asked Vaimo while driving one day. She is not Catholic, though grew up in a Christian faith, the daughter of a minister, someone much more well-versed in the Bible than the average Catholic. Given my estrangement from the Catholic Church, I was wrestling whether or not this would be offensive to some. In the end, as is clear from the series, I forged ahead. I guess when your very existence as a queer person is offensive to your religious upbringing, what’s a little extra sacrilege thrown in on top of the list of one’s sins? What is the role of the artist, if not to push the boundaries, to encourage questions from the viewer? And isn’t it so lovely that queerness and liberation have already entered the public discourse through saintly iconography? On my Instagram feed digital artists are sanctifying cultural workers, activists, artists, writers, and thinkers of the past and present. Artists like Gabriel García Román whose Queer Icons Series uplifts and highlights living queer folk in particular, does the important work of finding ways to honor queer folk as they thrive now, instead of only retrospectively. How queer a time we find ourselves in that we reach back to the past and historical iconography for representations of resilience in our present.
My Kitchen Saints are a way to explore the themes in my work I am called to better understand, the public and private considerations that we make related to our food consumption. While these hot sauces are commodities purchased in public, they adorn our private eating spaces. They represent convenience (not having to make your own), our global capitalist moment in time (exporting of foods primarily, but not exclusively, from Mexico), and most surprisingly are not simply benign ingredients. Instead, hot sauce is filled with cultural meaning claimed by those whose cultures eat and enjoy spice as a part of the cuisine but also imposed upon them by broader political, cultural and social forces. Think about the ways claiming the odor of the beloved Sriracha sauce in Irwindale is a public nuisance (and litigating it in 2013) is structural violence and our current moment where we see the increase of violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans. Think about how easily a bottle of Cholula or Tapatío can travel across the US/Mexico border compared to people. Spicy food gets racialized in the US that requires us to think about how those forces then get mapped onto people, and communities. When street vendors in California are targets of violence as they attempt to navigate economic criminalization for the products they provide the neighborhood, these Kitchen Saints do not only operate in the private sphere. When I use Tajín, I am connected to those vendors whether I am consciously thinking of those connections or not.
1000 news cycles ago (more specifically, a month ago) Pope Francis spoke out and definitively reiterated that priests cannot bless same-sex unions. Despite signaling earlier support for same-sex marriages to be supported through civil means, the upholding of doctrine reaffirmed that the church believes you can be a practicing Catholic or a practicing queer but not both. Given I’ve made my vows to a woman I love deeply on the side of a cliff in 2013, I’m going to keep practicing queerness in all I do. Which means, while my Kitchen Saints may be sacrilegious, they’re also part of a queer lineage that blesses my food, and spice up my life. My Kitchen Saints are healing me, which I hope in part heals you.
Questions to ponder:
Who are your kitchen saints?
What do you need to exorcise?
What connections do you see between the food you eat and our contemporary moment?
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