Eilen Itzel Mena
Eilen Itzel Mena – MA/MFA
I am an Afro-Dominican American artist from the South Bronx. My expanded visual arts practice utilises painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and installation as tools to search for joy and self-actualization. My work explores the liminal spaces we occupy within ourselves and in the world through the repetition of a set of symbols, forms and inversions. I have been developing a complex pictorial language.
Through highly semi-representational and abstract images, I portray the context, the meaning of these symbols/forms and their emotional range. Highly saturated pigments and dynamic mark-making in my practice is important to me, as it activates and exalts the meaning of the forms rendered. This is my form of handwriting. By including remnants of the figure, particularly heads, hands and feet, my work conveys a space in which the body and the spirit can communicate, find alignment and reconnect.