Michael Espinoza
Artist Statement
The purpose of my work is to contextualize the intimacy of textile within other disciplines including photography, sculpture, and installation to explore queer and intersectional identities. This body of work is very personal, meant to convey the embodied experience of reading, an intimate relationship that exists within the body but also between the worlds of the reader and the author. In these images, I am reading poems from the chapbook "Mr Universe" by UK poet and friend Rich Goodson.
All of the sources in these images are derived from three photographs which I then copied in cross-stitch embroidery, and recombined with photographs, sometimes in straight-forward ways (Reader 1-3), and sometimes in novel ways that propose alternatives to the embodied reality of the reader (Reader Collage 1-7). The original embroideries were made with the aid of an algorithmic platform that digitizes, pixilates, and interprets images to generate an embroidery pattern, which I hand sew, almost as a human printer; I consider this an alternative photographic printing process. The grounding imagery from this work is scans of the silk textile my body is photographed on in the original images.
This body of work was started in residence at Caldera Arts in Sisters, OR and generously supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Michael Espinoza | Portland, OR
Purchase Available Work
Reader 1, 2023
Archival print (sources: textile, photograph, scans)
6" x 6"