Kim Sandoval: What Does This ALL Mean?

From Rusteberg Art Gallery:

“Exhibition statement:

“If your paintings are the ‘event,’ Your photography is like the ‘aftermath.’”  Like an abandoned building after a fire. The feeling you get when you walk through a cemetery. Like a city after a flood. The forest after a wildfire. You know and understand what happened, but the destruction and damage is lasting and unimaginable. The peace and serenity once there are gone and all you can do is rebuild.

You’re left asking “What Does This ALL Mean?”

This exhibition is a series of black and white photos shot on 120mm film with a Holga, medium format camera. The goal of each series is to depict a form of autohistoria-teoría. Each set of images plays into a specific series of emotions and physicality that the artist has felt as they move through their stages of life, with this exhibition being the capstone and bridge into a whole new phase. The artist’s autohistoria is on full display to demystify how we view the land around us, the borderlands, and its people. The artist was raised in Brownsville, TX and has had the opportunity to call it home. However, home no longer feels like home. As the artist moves forward, she asks that you look, share, and feel with her as she closes this book and starts a new one with different chapters ahead of her.

Brief about the Artist:

Brownsville-based Chicana Scholar and Artist, Kimberly Sandoval, has been practicing art since 2014. Her primary mediums of work are oil painting, video art, and analog photography as different ways to explore her autohistoria-teoria. Her work is a glimpse into her life in Brownsville, TX. Having lived in Brownsville all her life, she has witnessed the media’s sensationalism when discussing her home and border life. She examines how she embodies and represents her home through her autohistoria. She fights, and speaks, for accurate representation of her LRGV. Her work goes beyond border media stereotypes and represents the life and experiences that occur around and within the Brownsville, South Texas borderlands.

She received her Bachelor of Art with a Visual Arts Concentration in 2020 from UTRGV and is currently a Master of Fine Art Candidate at said university. She has exhibited her video artwork in a Video Art Festival, Re:Karya, in Purwokerto, Central Java, Indonesia in 2022 and 2023, and as part of a virtual gallery for CultureHub in New York, NY, in 2023. She spoke about Culturally Affirming Art Pedagogies at the Curriculum & Pedagogy Conference in State College, PA, in 2023, the TAEA 2023 Conference in Allen, TX, and the NAEA 2024 Conference in Minneapolis, MN. She also chaired a panel discussion and gave an artist talk, on said panel, at the College Art Association 112th conference in Chicago, IL, in 2024. ”