Maria Rosario Montero, PhD.
This series includes a select number of live interviews with emerging artists from Latin America and southern California.
Organized and presented by Juan Herrera (Photo Media / Integrated Media MFA 21) and co-curated with Dr Carmen Hernandez. The Feminist Subject, Matter; Dialogues on the impact of feminist art on LatinX and Latin American Art is an initiative is supported by the Nick England Intercultural Arts Project (ICAP) Grant.
Maria Rosario Montero is an artist-researcher with a BA (PUC Chile), MFA (University of Chile), Master in Digital Anthropology (UCL) and recently PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths College). She had his first solo exhibition at the CCE Gallery (Chile) in 2004 and has participated in several group exhibitions in Chile, The Netherlands, China, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, Peru, USA and Venezuela, among others. She had been selected for several years for the government art fund (Fondart) to develop her practica. Her last publication is a monograph named “Private Landscape” in 2018. It is part of the selection of contemporary Chilean photographers for 02 / CNCA (2010) and C Photo edition, “New Latin Look'' curated by Martin Parr (2012). Currently, she lives in Santiago de Chile, and it is researching contemporary photographic practice and landscape representation in Chile. She takes part of the Working Disobediences group and the Border Agency art collective.
As a feminist research-artist, she is interested in how power structures affect landscape, identity, and territory representations. She approaches the topic from a theory-practice perspective, considering thinking, sensing and doing as relevant parts of knowledge production. As such, she works in the liminal space between art and anthropology. By the methods used (ethnographic observation, photography and digital media) and the issues addressed, I aim to develop a theory-practice that crosses beyond disciplinary classifications. Her work challenges the aesthetic value of the visual arts, and questions the objectivity of ethnographic representation. Her primary tools are my experience of embodying territorialized knowledge and photography. Thus, the photographic apparatus as an object of mediation provides tools that allow the displacement, interpretation and appropriation of the issues worked. And by doing so, I aim to question the photographic image’s indexical character and its colonial instrumentalization.
To be provided zoom link to for interviews RSVP juanherrera@alum.calarts.edu with subject line The Feminist Subject, Matters.