Nierika : Santuario Somático

Edgar Fabián Frías

February 2 - March 8, 2020
Photos by Mario Gallucci

Drawing on the artist’s indigenous, queer, pagan, witchy, mutagenic, and chimerica identities this installation features new and existing work including digital prints, custom-designed ready-made objects in the form of shower curtains and pillows, video projection and screen-based video. The title of the exhibition is based around the concept of The Nierika, a sacred woven portal also known as "Ojo de Dios" in Spanish or Eye of God in English. This sacred object has been used by the Wixarika people as an amulet, talisman and tool for accessing spiritual magic. The Nierika expresses the idea of integration and a “binding together”. For the artist it represents not only how we are linked to a larger world through ecology, community, and spirituality but also how diverse hybridities are bound within the self. The Nierika therefore is not only a portal, an offering and a place of respite, but also a totem for a hybridized spirituality fusing self-fashioned identities in visual art, self- care and consciousness evolution. It is the core of the journey and the icon of self-discovery.

Edgar Fabián Frías, MA, LMFT identifies as a nonbinary, queer, indigenous (Wixárika) and Latinx interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and licensed psychotherapist. Their work traverses academic, social, historical, and relational planes, building bridges and weaving webs. Their practice is amorphous and expansive, rooted in multivalent forms of connection and in the magic that emerges from it. Born in East Los Angeles, Frías earned dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio art from the University of California, Riverside and completed an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, with an emphasis on Interpersonal Neurobiology. Consequently, Frías’ work is often collaborative and engages with interpersonal aspects of consciousness and the continuing effects of colonial and patriarchal structures on the health and resiliency of marginalized communities. Their work has been shown at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Vincent Price Art Museum, Human Resources, Machine Project, SOMArts, ESMoA, Recess Gallery, Pieter Performance Space, and PAM Residencies. Frías is currently participating in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship

Visual motifs used in this body of work include the artist’s own body, as well as sacred animals, and shamanic figures, but also includes clowns, aliens and mutagenic beings. This engagement with otherness focuses on characters that have slippery presences withing our contemporary society. The clown/alien/zombie imagery speaks to the profound ability these characters have to traverse multiple spaces simultaneously and inhabit multiple forms at the same time. Frías uses these images as they trigger a sense of cognitive dissonance, occupying a space both fun and joviality but with underlying issues relating to fear, the abject and to horror. Like the depiction of the shaman or of the witch, these works seek to bring up images that elicit cognitive dissonance and to use them in reshaping narratives around religion, spirituality and polymorphic identities.

Frías uses this expression of hybridized identity within a complex calculus of spirituality – investigating their role in creating the mechanism of spirituality as an artist, two-spirit marakame (shaman) and trained psychotherapist. For them, interstitially and liminality are the avenue for exploring a new sense of communion with the divine. Growing up as a Jehovah’s witness, Frías developed within a spiritual community, and, upon being forced to leave the church, felt there was a deep void within them. Through their multimodal praxises, they have been cultivating a community of practitioners dedicated to rectifying the damage that religion has done and, collectively finding ways to relate to it again through aesthetic and participatory means.

Aesthetically, the work is visually playful, kitschy and campy, using imagery that is equally at home in pop-gif animations and irreverent internet memes as it is in on the label of New Age tonics or self-help books. But the work goes further to consciously play between attractive and repulsive polities in our minds. For example, the artist uses a saturated color pallet as a tactic to repurpose marketing and media aesthetics, one tool of capitalism’s allure. The artist undermines the use of color as a tool of media indoctrination and asks us if we can use these colors to create an opportunity to imbue the visual language of commercialism and popular culture with idiosyncratic and bespoke spells, thereby creating an alternative to corporate/capitalist brainwashing in popular media. Thus, with their work overall and with the video work specifically, Frias seeks to crash into the massive conglomeration that is corporatized media produced today.

Opening Reception:
Saturday, February 1st, 6-9pm
Etheric Bodies Ceremony with Edgar Fabián Frías, 7pm
Artist Edgar Fabián Frías will lead a short opening ceremony working with the Nierika Energy Body Mist. This mist was created by Frías and contains various flower essences and essential oils. It was made specifically for the exhibition, with the intention to invoke embodied awareness and facilitate interspecies communion. Participants will be able to process their ceremonial journey with the mist through writing, drawing, and/or movement, and will then be able to share their experiences with the group.
Following the ceremony, the mist will become available for visitors to connect with as part of their experience of Frías' exhibition. Location: Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate Ave.

Intro to Divination Practices for Creatives with Edgar Fabián Frías:
In collaboration with partner organization C-3 the artist will offer a workshop called Intro to Divination Practices for Creatives. In this workshop attendants will have the opportunity to learn about divinatory practices as a whole and the ways these practices intersect with contemporary art making. Attendants will also participate in a divinatory experience in collaboration with local plant spirits and through a guided visualization directed by Frías, seeing what comes through to the collective psyche. Movement, writing, drawing, or other forms of expression will be utilized to process the experience. Afterward, the group will come together to share any psychic downloads received for their creative practices.
Sunday, February 2, 4pm
Location: c3:initiative, 412 NW 8th Avenue