Unsettled anatomies

SANTA FE — It had been years since I had been inside of a high school. So, visiting the exhibition "Homecoming" at New Mexico School for the Arts this week brought back memories of parade floats, prom and all those times I used to sneak into the library to read art books when I was supposed to be in math class. I started high school as an awkward, gangly kid with a prominent stutter. After taking acting classes, the stutter went away, but I was still pretty awkward.

I changed a lot in high school, and even more so in college. Not everyone who leaves home at 18 comes back a few years later a different person, but many of us do. My parents were probably more shocked than I realized by all the weird performance art projects I started doing. To their credit, they remained supportive.

Ana Atalaya Magdalena's post-high school changes were even more noticeable than mine. Assigned male at birth, she returned home to Santa Fe after transitioning, not sure whether her family and friends would accept her as a woman. She was pleasantly surprised when many folks she suspected might be transphobic were not. But she was rejected by one of her closest family members, whom she had always assumed would accept her. Homecoming is not always a happy occasion.

I walked through the show with Magdalena. Two of her pieces in "Homecoming" — a painting and a freestanding sculptural assemblage — depict life-sized stag-woman creatures. The sculpture has a psychological quality that reminds me of the work of the late, great Marisol Escobar. Her head is a ceramic self-portrait with real antlers attached. There's also a thing that looks like an antler but is actually a pale, corroded railroad spike. This brought to mind Allen Ginsberg's poem "Sunflower Sutra" about a sooty old sunflower that thinks it's a locomotive; in this case, the railroad spike, after decades in the desert, seemed to think it was an antler. The stag-woman wears the artist's frayed bomber jacket. At the base is a pile of iron-rich rocks containing turquoise. Magdalena said she found the rocks, antlers and spike while hiking in a remote part of New Mexico. She encountered a mountain lion on that hike, as well, but it slunk away without incident.

Magdalena didn't know what the stag-woman meant when it first began cropping up in her work. But then she remembered her childhood fascination with Greek myths, especially the figure of Artemis, goddess of hunting. She once went deer hunting with her dad when she was a child, but she felt too much compassion for the deer to shoot it. She liked the story of Artemis and Actaeon, in which the goddess turned a human hunter into a stag to be hunted by his own dogs. Magdalena realized that in affirming her womanhood as an adult, she had also rejected the ideology of masculine domination that hunting symbolized for her. The stag-woman is a trans woman par excellence — not only transgender but transspecies — a woman who has overcome her separation from nature and lives as a "natural woman" in every sense of the term.

Bodily transformations are a running theme in "Homecoming." In Tse Tsan's digital paintings, women's bodies merge with their landscapes, becoming part-cactus or part-tree. In Ezri Horne's "Spike" series, abstract stoneware objects appear to undulate like sea anemones. Broadus Mobbs, meanwhile, has created a series of H.R. Giger-like creatures in steel, which might be alien, crustacean or machine. Two of them are motorized and leashed to thick rubber bands. One bounces in a steel frame, while the other ambles in a circle, quite noisily, around a metal post. I was excited by all of these works — all exceptionally strong.

Some of my favorite pieces in the show were made by Vero Silva, who writes in their statement: "My work exists at the intersection of body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria; the forms I create reclaim my once volatile and hostile experience with adolescence through a queer lens." On a ragged banner that fills an entire gallery wall, Silva has painted a reclining figure of ambiguous gender. Most of their body is hidden behind their thin legs, knobby knees and twisty, distorted feet. I was even skinnier in high school than I am now and always wore long swim trunks to the beach because I was so embarrassed about my bony legs, which didn't conform to the beauty standards of either gender. It wasn't until I discovered Egon Schiele's drawings of scrawny, distorted figures with knobby knees like mine — models who looked so cool and elegant — that I thought, hey, maybe I'm not as ugly as I thought. Maybe all body types can be attractive if viewed in the right light. Apart from Schiele's drawings, made in my great-grandparents' era, I didn't see a lot of positive representations of bodies like mine, certainly not in 1990s-era movies or TV shows. Body positivity wasn't a movement yet, as far as I was aware, and I had never heard of nonbinary identities. Perhaps if I had, I could have learned to embrace my weird, gender-nonconforming teenage body instead of being ashamed of it.

That's one reason I think this show is important. The five artists, who graduated from NMSA between the years 2017 and 2021 are far enough out from high school to have solid, consistent art practices. But they're still close enough in time that the pain and awkwardness of adolescence has not faded from their memories. Like heroes returning from a long journey of self-discovery, or butterflies returning to caterpillar-land post-transformation, these young artists serve as examples for the next generation coming up. The bodily and psychological transformations expressed in their works show pathways beyond trauma and self-loathing.

But the show is not just for teenagers. As a middle-aged adult, I found it personally moving. It helped me remember parts of my adolescence I had forgotten and perhaps from which I still need to heal. Just because I'm no longer a teenager, that doesn't mean I've stopped changing, either. An aging body can be just as awkward and uncomfortable as an adolescent one. Some days, when I wake up with aches and pains, I feel like one of Mobbs' creaky, lumbering robots.

This show helped me remember that disliking one's body is a near-universal experience, and even if we may have accepted our body at some point in the past, that doesn't mean we're permanently happy. Old insecurities can return, especially if our bodies change in unpredictable ways. But recognizing that we're all in the same boat — that all bodies are imperfect and we're all "hideous human angels" as Allen Ginsberg once put it — is a step toward self-acceptance.

The exhibition is on view through Feb. 27. Because NMSA is a closed campus, visitors must email the visual arts chair, Karina Hean, at karina.hean@nmsa-ai.org to make an appointment. It is well worth it.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.