ana atalaya magdalena
ARTWORKS WRITING ABOUT
A sculptural self-portrait created using found materials related to historic sites of turquoise and gold mining near my hometown, exploring the symmetries of patriarchal violence and industrial extraction.
Ceramics, micaceous clay, bedsheet, wood, ribbons, wire, screws, rope, found objects from the artist's personal belongings (cross pendant, a skirt, mullin), and found objects gathered at and near an abandoned mine in Los Cerrillos, New Mexico (metal bar, rusted nails, shooting target/spoon, turquoise). Dimension Variable.
Installation in Our Duty To Win at Alas De Agua Cultural Center, Santa Fe, NM, March 2026 - April 2026
A video poem about the 1945 testing of the first atomic bomb in southern New Mexico, New Mexico created using archival sources including footage of the 1945 "Trinity" test, Google Maps Screenshots of New Mexico, Missouri, and The Pacific Ocean, a postcard from the Sanctuario De Chimayo, and photographs of "village life" in Northern New Mexico, alongside video filmed outside White Sand National Park, video filmed in Saint Louis, Missouri, where Mallinckrodt Chemical Works produced the enriched uranium used in the Manhattan Project. I combine these elements to understand my personal associative relationship with generational family traumas related to histories of nuclear colonialism.
An altar to the first two years of my medical transition and my second puberty, built from a collection of artworks, personal ephemera, and family heirlooms. I mean to honor this part of my life using the folk catholic traditions of my Nuevo Mexicano family.
Ceramics, Hand-Gathered Clay, Family Photographs, Coral, Antler, Oil Paint, Collograph Prints, Other Found Objects. Dimension Variable.
Installation at "Between Miracles" at Alas De Agua Cultural Center, Santa Fe, NM, Septmber 2025 - October 2025
A short film comparing myself as a “doll” (contemporary slang for trans women) with the first Hispanic American Girl Doll, Josefine Montoya, who is, like myself, ethnically Nueva Mexicana.
Made with the support of the Gephart Institute during my participation in the Atkins Residency in The Art of Democracy
A self-portrait made in memory of an oral history belonging to my mother’s family concerning a mesa (plateaued mountain) in northern New Mexico. The work compares historic family histories of colonial violence and displacement with my own contemporary experiences of distance and memory.
Plaster, Duct Tape, Felt, Found Materials including a piece of the short story “I Love My Husband” by Nélida Piñon (translated to English), pieces of an early 20th-century art book concerning the Santa Fe hotel La Fonda, a foraged Artemisia leaf (Artemisia is a type of mug root which is said to help with dreams and inducing stillbirths), a wasp nest, tree branches, a broken cup, lipstick, barbed wire and duct tape.
Installed and ritually destroyed on the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate during my participation in the 2024 Yale Norfolk School of the Arts residency program.
A video work juxtaposing historic documentary footage of the American Chicano with self-captured footage of myself living as a student on the American East Coast. I am asking questions about my relationship to these historical movements of Latine identity as a Queer Chicana in higher education.
Created during my participation in the 2024 Yale Norfolk School of the Arts residency program.
Barbed Wire, Duct Tape, Acrylic Paint, Found and Archival Materials, Dimensions Variable
These three sculptures, which I call “sex dolls”, are intended as a means of comparing and allegorizing the process of environmental industrialization and physical sexualization. By decorating pieces of found lumber with a combination of found materials like duct tape, rope, sandpaper, barbed wire, and a band-aid, alongside archive materials related to the site of personal and familial trauma, and then reintroducing and documenting those wood forms in dialogue with a natural landscape, I am attempting to complicate the boundaries of social transformation and natural origin.
Created and exhibited during a summer at the Yale Norfolk School of Art residency program.
A conversation between a soul and a body, presented as a disorienting map, to deterritorialize the body and the land. I attempt to undermine the duality of the subject and the site through a juxtaposition of cartographic and bodily imagery. By comparatively documenting Europe and my own subjugated body as analogies of each other, I attempt to model a kind of queer diasporic mapmaking in which the self is literally disoriented from its location in the body and the nation.
Augmented Reality Rendering of Archival Photography and Found Material Sculpture
An augmented reality installation in response to the Cowbelles monument by combining poetry, sculpture, and historic footage to explore themes of Manifest Destiny and colonization in relation to the Santa Fe Plaza.
Commissioned by The City of Santa Fe as part of the OJOS DIFFERENTES initiative. Created in collaboration with RefractAR.