NOME is pleased to announce Of Daughters and Dreams, a solo exhibition by the artist Priscilla Dobler Dzul. Her paintings, sculpture, video, and performance works have addressed notions of belonging, borders, alienation, and social inequality as they relate to the history of migration and indigenous cultures. Her most recent works comprise large-scale paintings, tapestries, and glazed, painted sculptures inspired by the bold colors and forms of Mayan mythological oral stories and Alebrije folk art that represent all elements of life: air, water, earth, and fire.

Her ebullient canvases depict expansive landscapes featuring a range of hybrid animals, human figures, and plant life. These invented worlds teem with dreamlike visions, sensual pleasures, collisions of different life forms and genders—yet many of these tableaux nonetheless bristle with an undercurrent of darkness: brutality, violence, death, and turbulent transformations. Paraíso Perdido depicts a paradise of sexual pleasure, boxing, and struggle for reproductive rights with the jaguar goddess overseeing it all. In Jaguar Protector, sueños demoníacos, a three-headed woman encroaches upon a reclining nude figure protected by a jaguar with a snake protruding from its mouth. Inspired by recurring dreams, the painting seeks new forms for ancestors who have had their stories, bodies, and voices erased to speak in the present and future. Her highly glazed clay sculptures introduce fantastical creatures who live between worlds—between the ancient and contemporary, animal and human.

Donna Haraway describes a trickster figure as someone “that might turn a stacked deck into a potent set of wild cards for refiguring possible worlds.” Dobler Dzul adopts the literary and mythic device of the trickster in her multi-media works to address the violence, segregation, and cultural erasure that threatens indigenous Latinx identity and knowledge. The figures that appear in her works are boundary crossers set on disrupting intersecting forms of oppression with their pleasurable, playful games

Of Daughters and Dreams

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