Estela López Solís
Solitudes 11
2014
India ink on cotton paper
Original work
15.2 x 22 cm
Location
400, rue Lindsay, Drummondville
Description of the work
This work is part of the Solitudes series, which is rooted in the extensive photographic documentary on human migration. Estela López Solís seeks to shed light on the uncertainty and displacement of migrants and translate the emotional charge that surrounds the issue.
In her practice, the artist explores formal and conceptual opposites, including black and white, fullness and emptiness, indoors and outdoors, serenity and anguish. The Musée à ciel ouvert provides her with the space to create an additional contrast between the publicness of the downtown streets and her images, which convey an almost silent inner life.
With poetry and finesse, she turns the spotlight on the anonymous realities at the core of one of the most pressing global challenges. Through her intimate, totally uncontextualized drawings, Estela López Solís highlights the universality of these realities.
Estela López Solís
About the artist
Estela López Solís was born and raised in Mexico, where she studied visual arts. Her work has been supported by cultural institutions in France, Cuba, Mexico and Canada, including the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Canada Council for the Arts. Her works have been showcased there in solo and group exhibitions, as well as part of performances and in-situ installations. Today, she lives and works in Québec’s Eastern Townships.
In 2019, she began a research and creation residency in Havana, Cuba, as part of the Rencontres en art actuel Montréal-Habana Encuentros de Arte Contemporáneo through a collaboration between the DARE-DARE artists centre (Montréal) and Artista X Artista centre (Havana). Building on her research, López Solís is currently developing a creative project (photography, video, textile art) driven by stories on the history and heritage of human exploitation in the colonial period.
Artistic approach
Common thread
Through her artistic approach, Estela López Solís seeks to reveal—without ever betraying—the intimate and secret lives of people, things and places. By exploring the emotional realities and inner worlds that evolve away from watchful eyes, her work touches upon the ties that bind us all as humans. The small format that characterizes most of her drawings expresses the artist’s aim to create an intimate context that forges an emotional bond between the public and her works.
Interdisciplinarity is also an integral part of Estela López Solís’ practice and projects, which are at the confluence of visual, performance, relational and media art. Indeed, she intersects disciplines (textile art, video, drawing, installation, graphic art, etc.) like a patiently woven quilt. Serial work remains a recurrent element in her projects and enables her to observe the shifts in direction sparked by the slight variations in form in her works.
In recent years, Estela López Solís has been creating works from words and sentences she collects from the visitors who attend her performances. By crafting an intimate context to foster dialogue and listening, she quietly collects the words that express dark thoughts, fears, anxieties and emotional pain.
These fragments of different stories become the raw material for many of the artist’s projects. She works the material through repetitive actions like embroidery, engraving and transcription and embraces others’ deepest thoughts to make them her own. She then respectfully claims the words to extract their universal essence to make them ours. Through the process, Estela López Solís strives to hear herself in the voices of others and thus find the ties—or chains—that bind.