LAURA CAMILA MEDINA // Mi Reflejo

On view July 15–September 3, 2023
Opening reception Saturday, July 15 (2-4 p.m.)
Artist talk Thursday, July 20 (5 p.m.)

Nationale welcomes the return of Laura Camila Medina for her debut solo with the gallery, Mi Reflejo. Presciently titled, this phrase translates from the artist’s native Spanish to “my reflection” and, in her signature dream-like and world-building spirit, serves as a careful foil to a deeply introspective personal narrative. The works on display intertwine the artist’s childhood memories with her lived experiences in what she considers the in-between—the tangible limbo state between a cultural and national identity and its implied hurdles. Through painting, sculpture, textile, and video Medina creates imagined worlds that exist as an archive addressing the real complexities of immigrant culture, “the American Dream”, gender, and familial lineage. She explores the possibilities of recontextualizing that which felt fragmented into something new, something magical and empowering.

In this manner, the connective theme of multitudes rises to the surface. Calming shades of pink, green, blues, and yellows permeate each of the artworks to envelop the viewer in a luxuriously soothing aura. Medina repeatedly plays with dimensionality through paper, clay, and Papier-mâché to both beckon to the viewer and create embodied visuals of intimate and collectively ancestral memories. The artist’s intuitive collages are saturated with images of portals, spiders, feminine forms, and flora, alongside pop-media stills from her childhood and early adolescence. These ephemera are inextricable from her upbringing, and therefore her creative practice, and together take shape as composite builds of a fluid identity still legitimizing its presence. From Disney World to Sandra Cisneros to 2000s pop stars, Medina emphatically lays claim to her origins and their influence. Ultimately, these pieces seek comfort in that which is soft. They carry multitudes that bring justice to Medina’s girlhood and each of the versions of herself that she still carries inside while transporting viewers to an internal, delicate mythos otherwise inaccessible.

Laura Camila Medina (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia, and raised in Orlando, FL. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, Fuller Rosen Gallery, Wieden + Kennedy, the Portland Art Museum, Nationale, Stelo Arts, and with the Nat Turner Project. She was awarded the Studio Fellowship at Yale University’s CCAM, Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, New Media Fellowship at Open Signal, Artist in Residence at the Living School of Art, ACRE Residency, and the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency. Alongside Angela Saenz, she is part of Maracuya con Leche, a collaborative project that encourages artists to participate in creative exchange with their community. Together they were the IPRC Artists & Writers in Residence in 2020 and were invited to the Caldera Artist Residency in 2022. Medina earned her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently a Painting & Printmaking MFA candidate at Yale University. She is represented by Nationale.

PRESS & MORE
Cliff Notes, Ella Ray, Variable West, July 2023
What to Do in Portland This Week, Matthew Trueherz, Portland Monthly, July 14. 2023
VizArts Monthly: Personal perceptions, Jason N. Le, Oregon ArtsWatch, July 31, 2023
Recommended Visual Arts Exhibition, Lindsay Costello, EverOut Portland, August 2023
Four Art Galleries to Check Out in Portland, Oregon, Emily Wilson, Hyperalergic, August 28, 2023