Monochromatic Dreams

Monochromatic Dreams features the work of Chicago-based artist Yvette Mayorga. Through multimedia installations and candy-colored confectionary, Mayorga tackles issues of race, identity, and gender using visual tropes of celebration. Mayorga’s work is directly informed by the politics within and beyond the US/Mexico border, with particular interest in its broad effects across generations and geography. Drawing inspiration from the material culture of southwestern borders, her life as a first-generation Latinx artist, and her parents experience as immigrants in the 1970s, Mayorga’s work examines how uncertainty is covered with a veneer of celebration.

In Monochromatic Dreams, Mayorga uses pink as a tool of discomfort to defy gender norms and anxieties of bodies in our current landscape. The works piped with lush thick pastels stand as utopian dreamscapes collaged with personal imagery, technology, toys, and Rococo vases that allude towards a current state of constant surveillance and its excess on display in the media. The Rococo ceramics become moments of encapsulation of present histories intertwined with a colonial past that has contributed to current desires of indulgence.