Niru Ratnam will present a solo presentation of Alicia Reyes McNamara (b. Chicago, 1984) in the Exposure section of EXPO Chicago 2024. Reyes McNamara is a queer Latinx artist who draws on their dual Mexican-Irish cultural heritage to make works that articulate non-binary identities through reference to myth and folklore.
For EXPO Chicago, Reyes McNamara is producing a new series of paintings and a site-specific floor piece that will fill the booth. Their starting point is the ‘Mano Poderosa’, a syncretic tradition in Mexican religious art featuring the motif of Christ’s disembodied hand bearing its stigmata. Folk traditions in Mexico often attributed magical powers to the image, which brought together Christian elements with folk Espiritismo traditions, West African religion and indigenous spiritual beliefs.
In Reyes McNamara’s re-interpretation of the Mano Poderosa, the hand is seen mirrored in the floor piece with water flowing from the stigmata so that it surrounds a female figure. She in turn is linked to two larger faces presented in profile and some sort of source for the energy that pervades
the image. On the walls around this floor piece on the walls are four main paintings, each of which features a female figure based on mythological guardians; the trickster, the unknowable, the welcomer and the shapeshifter.
The booth offers a generative space; where Reyes McNamara re-fashions what is already an image of hybridity to open up a non-hierarchical space where redemption is not found in conventional religious figures but in femmes who nourish each other and the spaces around them. If the Mano Poderosa is a hybrid re-reading of colonial discourse, Reyes McNamara takes that further with this radical queering of this folk tradition.
