Jorge Palacios Portfolio 2023

UCSC Environmental Art + Social Practice Application

Ensueño

2022

glass, soil, projected videogame

This game is a window into the past, present and future of the Rio Grande. Created using images from Google Maps' Street View of the U.S.-Mexico border, these panoramic photos act as the central scenery of the game. I then generated a water-like reflective landscape from topological terrain data of the Rio Grande, then a water-like shader that represents the river itself. The sound and digital landscape acts as a prism into the region’s dissonant history. Defined by Indigenous land dispossession, migration, border militarization and state violence, this river has also been home to people and non-human beings for millennia. The game’s interface simultaneously makes apparent both the current condition of the river and the ecologies and non-visible agents that have shape the land.

Game can be played here: https://jorge-palacios-fd7x.squarespace.com/config/

*made from Narragansett/Wampanoag land 3*
2022
glass, soil, mixed media
This cast pieces was made through pressing molten glass into soil from Narragansett/Wampanoag land. This is creates a record of the histories and agencies within the earth itself, attending to the information embodied within the soil.

*made from Lumbee/Tuscarora land*
2022
glass, soil, mixed media
This cast pieces was made through pressing molten glass into soil from Lumbee/Tuscarora land. This is creates a record of the histories and agencies within the earth itself, attending to the information embodied within the soil.

made from Narragansett/Wampanoag land process video

2021

Performance

This was the casting process used to make the made from Narragansett/Wampanoag land piece.

on the land, reaching
2022
inkjet printed photograph
This is a photograph of a tree as seen outside of my old apartment in Rhode Island. It was observed while finishing the creation of the *on the land* series, and it shows the uncanny agency that land may enact. I use this picture to show the agential capacities within histories, non-human and more than human beings.

*Lupita y Carlitos*
2022
glass, silkscreened enamel print
This piece was created during a fellowship at Pilchuck Glass School. I developed the technique used to create vessels from silk screen enamel on glass prints. This print is of my paternal grandparents. Creating this vessel is a meditation on family history, craft processes, and my own journey through decolonization.

*The Guest Book*
2018-2022 (ongoing)
inkjet printed book
Branching from the concept of the land acknowledgement, this guest book serves as a way for settlers and those benefitting from settler colonialism to acknowledge that they occupy Indigenous land. In this case it is Narragansett and Wampanoag. By referring to the American continent as Turtle Island, it unsettles the colonizer’s definition of borders and land ownership. The book mimics the brand identity of the exhibition, blurring the line between gallery marketing and artwork.
The first book was displayed at the 2018 RISD Glass Triennial and at the *Parallels Brown-RISD Dual Degree Program Exhibition.* A subsequent iteration exhibited in the *____scapes* show at the RISD Museum’s Gelman Gallery. A fourth iteration was made for my solo show … *and will be again | … y lo volverá a ser* at ROJO gallery.

*Convergence*
2022
glass, hardware, projected videogame
This device uses a glass sphere as a means of capturing a video game hologram. It features a glass controller that can be used to steer a pyramid spaceship. The player must navigate through the void past Mesoamerican deities, Final Fantasy characters, Lotería cards, photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, asteroids, cempasúchil flowers and everything in between. Through collapsing space and time, this device generates a window into the ancestral past and our place as ancestors of the future.

*Convergence*
2022
glass, hardware, projected videogame
Detail.

a transtemporal duet

2021

projected video, textile, sound

This is a sound installation and video projection on a deshilado tablecloth. The textile, made by my maternal grandmother, Socorro Casillas, was created as a gift for my parents as a wedding gift. Deshilado is a laborious craft that my mother and I never learned due to its sharp learning curve. Videos of the sky over Yanaguana project onto the tablecloth, an activity I find grounds me in the present. Ambient bird chirps and binaural beats echo through a stereo sound system, providing sound therapy for meditating through the melancholy of migration, displacement and loss of intergenerational knowledge.

*on the land*
2021
glass, soil, inkjet printed photographs
A study on displacement and my positionality on Wampanoag and Narragansett land. Using the soil on which RISD occupies, I created drawings with my feet and took flash photography at midnight of the few forest areas on campus. I created this book in hopes of gaining some sort of nuance to this often confusing and haunting feeling of sitting with the feeling of displacement on a place that is not your Native land, but holds some kinship in Indigenous solidarity. I casted my feet in glass using the soil which I place over a large print of an inverted photograph. The glass bubbled as if the soil were speaking.

*on the land, pies descalzos*
2021
glass, soil, inkjet printed photographs
Detail.

*on the land, page 7*
2021
inkjet printed photograph
Detail.

*Gorilla Warfare*
2020
glass, hardware, videogame, mixed media
Inspired by the several coup d’etats in Latin America, and specifically the Guatemalan coup d’etat in the 50s sprung about because of the United Fruit Company, I created a first person shooter, Gorilla Warfare. In the game, you play as a Guatemalan farmer who finds a magical glass banana gun and must defend themselves against U.S. trained troops. Will you prevail?

*Gorilla Warfare*
2020
glass, hardware, videogame, mixed media
Detail.

*Ancestors*
2020
glass, soil, hardware, projected videogame, mixed media
As a way of understanding the memory of place both embodied and in dialogue with oneself, I crafted glass meteorites by rolling bubbles of molten glass in the soil of occupied stolen Narragansett and Wampanoag land. The interiors were then silvered to create an internal mirror that reflects a lustrous interior. These meteorites may seem alien, but I wanted to capture the earthly ancestral information recorded on their surface texture. Reflecting back is a distorted glimmer, a potential dialogue between oneself and the land they occupy. What could these meteorites say to me, a mestizo with ancestral ties to Central Mexico? How do we share a kinship on Turtle Island? I animate these thoughts through a video game space projected onto a room where the stones speak in poems. One can then interact with the digitized spirit realm of these stones using a controller who is half meteorite themself.

Ancestors Videogame Footage

2020

glass, soil, hardware, projected videogame, mixed media

This is footage of the video game projected in the Ancestors installation.