Tessie Barrera-Scharaga builds mixed-media installation environments and assemblage artworks that explore the connections and tensions between individual, subjective perspectives and broader social, political, environmental or cultural phenomena, questions and concerns. She is interested in human stories of transformation and transcendence that may inspire admiration, but may also terrify her. The work is at times painful, at times joyful and always viscerally attached to the realities of contemporary life—her own and the lives of those with whom she shares this planet.

Born in New York City of Colombian and Salvadoran parents, Barrera-Scharaga followed her family’s trajectories through the Americas (North, Central and South) in her childhood and teenage years, returning to the U.S. to attend college. Barrera-Scharaga draws a direct correlation between her artistic process and her experiences growing up in South and Central America. Catholic nuns introduced her to the poems of Ruben Dario, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, instilling a life-long addiction to poetry and an appreciation for symbolism and metaphor. Her work delves into psychological states and operates in a symbolic realm in which both the conscious and unconscious minds are accessed, making associations between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the rational and the irrational.

The artist uses a wide variety of media and technology, incorporating paper, wood, clay, metal, fabric, found objects, recorded sound, photography, video and printmaking, particularly silk-screen and polymer-plate generated images.

Barrera-Scharaga lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been exhibited widely in the region and she has participated in exhibitions nationally and abroad.

Cabrillo Gallery’s LatinXperiencia series of annual exhibitions features LatinX artists speaking to a wide diversity of themes, offering a platform to foster cross-cultural connections and generate meaningful conversations within our diverse academic community and beyond.

***

La serie de LatinXperiencia exposiciones y programas anuales de la Galería Cabrillo protagonizada por artistas LatinX que abordan una amplia diversidad de temas. Estas exposiciones ofrecen una plataforma para fomentar conexiones interculturales y generar conversaciones significativas dentro de nuestra diversa comunidad académica y más allá.

images clockwise: "Radical Prayers", mixed media, "The Forbidden Language", mixed media, "Broken", mixed media

Please check out this article by Content Magazine featuring Tessie Barrera-Scharaga