ana atalaya magdalena
CREaTIONS aBOUT
“Anita”
I created “Anita” in the summer of 2022 while living in New York. She is made from a doll I found at a junk shop, torn pieces of a copy of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago, and various found objects such as a cigarrete butt, lost keys, receipts, and the head of a minature toy deer. She functions as both a doll and a santo (a painted or carved wooden image of a saint/ancestor)
In
“Watch How Godzilla Aunt Eats The Cowboys”
Anita was 3d scanned and reproduced as a digital model in the installation which I made in colloboration with RefractAR studios on behalf of the City of Santa Fe for their “Ojos Difrentes” initative. “Watch How Godzilla Aunt Eats The Cowboys” is a permenant Agumented Reality installation visible at the Cowbellies Monument on the Santa Fe Plaza. By using their cellphone camera partipants can view Anita as “Godzilla Aunt”, a hovering kaiju surrounded by a herd of half cattle half human ghosts (made from images of early Euro-American settlers found in the Library of Congress). The work is a rhebuttal of John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress” in which a giant floating white woman lead settler families into the Western Frontier. For more information about this work you can read from the initative’s website, although I should note I am credited under the male pseudonym Artemisio
in
“Anita in Manhattan”
I began photographing Anita in and around the New York Metro system. I wanted her to be able to fully participate in modernity, as a proxy of and a companion in my own body’s cultural decontextualization Also, in the context of “Watch How Godzilla Aunt Eats The Tourists, contrasting her tiny scale in an Eastern City (NYC specifically has been a consitent source of New Mexico’s increasing Anglo population) to her noncoporeal height in a site of racial tourism allowed me to explore the poetic reversals which result from an unsited sacred. This photo series has been reproduced as illustrations for my first poetry collection “She Who Eats Tourists” which is avaliable for sale. Anita herself was lost in the mail between Santa Fe and Saint Louis last year and I hope that she is intact and treasured.