Donna Huanca

Introduction

"I USE A LOT OF MATERIALS FROM MY TRAVELS, AND HAVE BEEN COLLECTING TEXTURES AND TEXTILES FOR YEARS THAT BECOME SHELLS FOR THE PERFORMERS’ BODIES. I AM INSPIRED BY PALETTES FROM THE NATURAL WORLD AND AM INTERESTED IN TEXTURES AND SURFACES THAT ARE INSPIRED BY GEOLOGY AND BOTANY."

– Donna Huanca in Conversation w/ James Ambrose, Elephant Magazine, 2022

The body and skin are ongoing points of focus in Donna Huanca’s (b. 1980 in Chicago, US) work, where she employs them as both surface and material. The painted performers, who populate the immersive environments composed of Huanca’s studio works, dissimulate amongst the various elements, joining and extending them, this oscillation in and out of sentience composes an allegory to the fragmentation of identity. Donna Huanca’s paintings are derived from these durational performances. After collaging and printing images from past performances and prior works onto canvas, Huanca paints over this documentation with oil, sand and raw pigments - on the one hand camouflaging this history, while at the same time extending the duration of the performance into perpetuity.

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Works