Todo aquí ha pasado por el estómago del fuego.
El horno es la máquina del tiempo, el volcán, el temazcal, el sol, el vientre.
El telar es el guardián del tiempo, del sedimento, el registrador, las raíces.
Everything here has passed through the stomach of fire.
The kiln is the time machine, the volcano, the temazcal, the sun, the womb.
The loom is the guardian of time, of the earth's sediment, the registrar, the roots.
I am a sculptor working with ceramic vessels, found and naturally harvested materials, and biomatter. My work investigates the origins of objects as primal extensions of the human body, as well as companions or guides through reality. Clay is my medium of choice for research because of its tactile immediacy, material agency, and geological memory.
The materials I use evoke memories of my childhood in rural Mexico before migrating to the United States, like scraping the crust of handmade cheese from a vessel, kicking red clay caked on my boots, and watching buckets catch rain from a leaky roof. My parents ran an Agropecuaria where they kept goats and bees and cultivated pecans and mushrooms, until a virus swept through the herd, collapsing the project, and causing our migration to California. That period of personal, economic, environmental, and migratory displacement continues to pulse through my practice, being reflected in thresholds where spaces of bodily and material logic meet, fail, and are transformed.
I create hybrid structures that bridge natural and synthetic matter; they are surrogates that metabolize or process their environments through speculative systems. Suspended vessels are tethered with found materials, forming networks of tension and flow. Partly buried vessels get weathered by the very elements that formed them, and familiar objects become foreign. The sculptures remain in states of transformation, getting rusted, stained, or discolored by their systems. The works become sites where body and landscape, memory and material, erosion and magical realism contend and refract in their complexities.
Born in Mexico and raised in the Central Valley of California, Lizalde immigrated with their family to the United States at fifteen years of age and has since lived a semi-nomadic life, most recently living in Mexico City and the Mojave Desert before settling in St Louis, MO to teach Ceramics at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University.
They hold a B.A. in Studio Art with a minor in Art History from the University of California, Davis, and earned an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023.
Lizalde has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture, the William and Dorothy Yeck Award from the 2023 Miami University Young Sculptors Competition, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Young Space Grant, the Hopkins Endowment for Studio Art Students, the Crocker-Kingsley Art Award, and the Herb Alpert Scholarship for Emerging Young Artists.
Their work has been exhibited at venues including The Torggler Art Center, Personal Space, Hiestand Galleries, Alfred University, The Dairy Center in Denver, Axis Gallery, the School of Visual Arts, Sierra Nevada University Gallery, Holland Project Gallery in Reno, CCA Hubbell Street Galleries, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, the Torrance Art Museum, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.
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