Tatiana Garmendia is a professor of fine arts in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division at Seattle Central College. She has exhibited her work throughout the US, including such venues as The Bronx Museum of Arts, Art In General, and Stux Gallery in New York. Among the European galleries where Garmendia has shown are The Milan Art Center in Italy, Castfield Gallery in England, and the Galeria Riesa Efau in Germany. Her works are in public collections in New York, Washington D.C., Miami, Illinois, California, Ohio, and the Dominican Republic.
Synthesizing formal concerns and a humanist engagement with history and culture, the artist’s figuration occupies fluid boundaries in plural life worlds. Born in Cuba at the height of the Cold War and immigrating to the USA as a youth, the artist’s practice deciphers myths, histories, languages, and tropes from different communal fonts. This variability is reflected in her use of interdisciplinarity and hybrid narratives reporting on lived experiences, real and imagined.
Border Crossing, 2015
Single Channel Video, 2:32 minutes
The human body becomes contested territory. A spotlight tracks movement across the artist’s body like a homeland security searchlight over borderlands, revealing international visas stamped on her skin. A spoken litany repeats and distorts verses from Reza Mohammadi’s poem You Crossed the Border, creating a disorienting intonation.