When Jocelyn Lorena Salaz's grandmother died in 2001, she started taking art seriously.
Fueled by her love for and memories of her late grandparents, she made a series of paintings and drawings of family members and religious icons, with a focus on the past.
"Retablos: Every Day Saints" is on display in the John Sommers Gallery on the art building's second floor through April 25. The reception was Friday night.
The installation pieces and framing materials come from her grandparents' farm in Cuba, New Mexico, where she was born and raised.
She said that in high school, she visited her grandparents every day after school.
"They celebrated their 50th anniversary, like, right before I was born, so they were really old," Salaz said. "I realized that my time with them was going to be short, like, on the one hand. And on the other hand, I thought they were, like, grandma and grandpa everlasting.. They were both born in 1911. And so they saw so much change in their lives, and they had a lot of struggles."
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Her paintings, which she said might feel out of place in a gallery, have a down-home, folk-art feel, especially with her special attention to how she frames her compositions. On some pieces, she painted elaborate colorful borders. Other pieces are framed with silver tin, which she covered in dotted designs with a dull nail.
She set up a bench from the farm with an old corn grinder attached. She also set up a shrine on her grandmother's old sewing machine table in the middle of the room.
"Galleries can sometimes be intimidating to the people and, like, noncontextual - especially my stuff," she said. "It seems like it might belong more in a home. And so I thought it was really important to bring some different things in to kind of make it feel more like a home or more familiar to my neighbors. I had a lot of people from Cuba come."
The large pencil drawing of her grandmother is a composite of visual clues pieced together from a pile of photos.
"I had to do a lot of putting her face together according to what I knew about the face," Salaz said. "Even to get her body, I had my sister model for the shirt and her handkerchief. I had her model, but I had to capture the gesture. Then I had to recall things about her."
She made sure to capture her grandma's bent pinky finger, which was always a source of fascination, Salaz said.
"She was milking a goat, and it kicked her," she said. "She went to the doctor, and they gave her one of those braces, and she just got mad at it one day, and she threw off. And her finger stayed that way. I had to go by intuition to get that hand to be old and wrinkly and to capture that little part of her finger."
She said she continues her relationship with her grandparents through her art.
'Retablos: Every Day Saints'
Monday-Friday, 8:15 a.m.-4:45 p.m.
Through April 25
Free
