A print of a man in shorts and a striped shirt, embroidered with a flower and featuring an etching of a Mayan deity, features a title telling the story of a man dying in the trunk of a car while attempting to cross the border. The text is a startling juxtaposition to an image so full of life, suggesting the ambient violence circulating the immigrant experience in the Americas.
Another print of a young Correa Valencia and her brother is adorned with an etching inspired by her brother’s chest tattoo. The title is a message from their mother imploring their father to care for them if anything should happen to her, especially “our baby girl.” Here again, the text creates an unconscious layer to the images, infusing it with a complex pathos.
The majority of the exhibition consists of 14 brightly colored wall-hanging textiles, varied in size, embroidered with figurative outlines also based on family photographs.
“I call them paintings,” says Correa Valencia, who trained as an oil painter through graduate school and only recently took up textile work. She learned the medium from her mother-in-law during the months of the pandemic lockdown; the pieces weave together intricate references to culture and community.
Often, the background fabric Correa Valencia adorns with her illustrations is a textile purchased in El Salvador or Mexico — or, in the case of the smaller works, tortilla napkins taken from family members’ kitchens. Many of the figures’ clothes are made from actual articles of clothing.
In both Absent and Present, embroideries on large Salvadoran fabrics featuring geometric patterns, a figure holds a child in their arms. In Present, the adult figure is filled in with a patterned fabric, while in Absent both adult and child dissolve against the background as ghostly outlines of white thread.
One of the largest textiles, Captured: Birds in Flight, features a two-toned blue background with the outlined figures of three children dressed in repurposed family clothing. Two girls pose playfully while a boy wearing the El Salvador coat of arms reaches both hands up in a dramatic gesture of surrender. Three birds, embroidered in a traditional Salvadoran decorative style, circle overhead.
