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Confronting Heritage
Cortney Metzger and Martín Wannam
March 17 - April 7, 2023 Public Reception: April 7, 5pm-8pm "Confronting heritage" is a visual exhibition featuring Cortney Metzger and Martín Wannam in conversation. The exhibition will present visual ideas of dynamic explorations of mediums utilized to individually explore, think and claim/ reclaim their mixed identities throughout the impact of coloniality and hegemony systems. Wannam, being a queer Guatemalan, will confront the constructed idea of their legacy for someone queer, brown, and immigrant, thinking about what it means to be a failure to reproduce an ideal in a heteropatriarchy world. Through photography, performance, and sculpture Wannam will confront standards placed on him via family legacy by disrupting those ideas through the act of queering. Metzger, of Osage descent, will confront the histories her people experienced during colonization and the removal of the Osage names through a combination of storytelling utilizing ceramic objects and the reclamation of her traditional name. |
Martín Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) is a visual artist and educator whose work critically examines Guatemalan's historical, social, and political climate, focusing on freedom dreaming for the queer individual. He focuses on the intersection of brownness and queer utopia that uses the foundation of iconoclasm and the aesthetic of maximalism through the tools of photography, sculpture, and performance for the constant evaluation of systematic structures such as religion, coloniality, folklore, and white supremacy.
He received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in the Spring of 2020, a Diploma in Contemporary photography from La Fototeca (GT) in 2016, and a BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar (GT) in 2015. Wannam has exhibited nationally and internationally, including various group and solo shows in Guatemala, The United States, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Korea. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of the Fronteristxs Collective, a collective of artists fighting for migrant justice and the abolition of the prison industrial complex.
Cortney Metzger is a mixed media artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in ceramics from Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri in 2016. She recently completed her Masters of Fine Arts with an emphasis in ceramics at the University of New Mexico in 2020. Cortney is of Osage decent and spent her summers growing up on the Osage reservation in Oklahoma. Drawing themes from her heritage, Cortney works in many media including video performance, textiles, and raw clay materials harvested from the lands sacred to her and her people.
He received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in the Spring of 2020, a Diploma in Contemporary photography from La Fototeca (GT) in 2016, and a BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar (GT) in 2015. Wannam has exhibited nationally and internationally, including various group and solo shows in Guatemala, The United States, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Korea. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of the Fronteristxs Collective, a collective of artists fighting for migrant justice and the abolition of the prison industrial complex.
Cortney Metzger is a mixed media artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in ceramics from Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri in 2016. She recently completed her Masters of Fine Arts with an emphasis in ceramics at the University of New Mexico in 2020. Cortney is of Osage decent and spent her summers growing up on the Osage reservation in Oklahoma. Drawing themes from her heritage, Cortney works in many media including video performance, textiles, and raw clay materials harvested from the lands sacred to her and her people.
