Chingona Por Vida is a collaborative multi-media project produced by Libby Paloma and Ace Lehner investigating queer, femme, Chicana identity. The work comes out of Paloma’s own history of negotiating cultural hybridity, and her struggles for visibility. Embracing creative autoethnography the project mines personal and familial histories of migration and survival and the negotiation of cultural identities as they exist in relation to time and place.
Through processes of sculptural and performative assemblage the work brings together Mexican and queer visual culture, often disidentifying with both in efforts to produce new visual forms that reflect queer femme Chicana aesthetics.
The project raises questions about the complex process of assessing people’s identities and the impossibility of visual encounters and photographs to ever present truth, or reflect the entirety of someone. There is always something illegible in the process of looking, and this act is always entangled with our cultural ideologies, and impacted by our relation to who we’re looking at. This work underscores identity as intersectional, contingent, and continually malleable.
The exhibition will be on view through November 27th at the LGBTQ Center Gallery, Kingston, NY.