‘Sad Girls’ exhibit offers surreal look at today’s anxieties
A week after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Jasmine Zelaya’s “Sad Girls,” at Art League Houston, struck a timely chord with me.
Zelaya is showing bold new works that respond to the fears and anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic and other sociopolitical crises of the past two years. For me, those pieces have another layer of meaningful urgency.
Zelaya’s distinctive visual vocabulary may look familiar because some of her earliest professional works were public art commissions the size of billboards. The monumental 2018 Art Blocks project “Twins,” on Main Street, introduced many Houstonians to her graphic, five-petaled flower patterns. Then came the mural “Tribute to Ms. Naomi H. Polk” at 1825 Washington and “Detroit Red” on the façade of a temporary classroom on the Rice University campus.
Zelaya didn’t plan to be a muralist. She earned her bachelor’s degree in painting from Kansas City Art Institute and worked six or seven years as an arts programmer before returning home to Houston in 2013 and setting goals for her own practice. Creating small, detailed paintings at a desk in her room, she applied for every opportunity she could find. She had a breakout year in 2017, when her work made it into “The Big Show” at Lawndale Art Center for the first time and appeared on the cover of the prestigious magazine New American Paintings, which sponsors regional competitions to honor great work being done around the nation. The commission for the Art Blocks Houston project happened at about the same time and changed her artistic life completely, Zelaya told me. “I realized I could do something with the work. People were responding to it. I saw that it sparked dialogue.”
Although she has tinkered with more realistic styles of drawing and painting, the flat perspective and stylized graphics of her public works has become her calling card. The six large canvases of “Sad
Girls” have that look-at-me drama. Like other signature Zelaya works, they’re close-up portraits of brown-skinned women whose faces are concealed by floral “masks” — a motif that expresses the tension between emotions and outward appearances.
The characters of the stunning title triptych look like they’ve been crying. The starker “Shadow Figure” nearby contains a more abstract void of a face that’s almost a phallic shape. But it too is isolated against a backdrop of jaunty, white-petaled flowers. That juxtaposition gives the paintings power and mystery: How could anyone be distraught when she’s in the midst of a such a happy garden?
The show’s title refers to the “sad girls” of chola culture who sometimes have tears tattooed on their cheeks. Chola-style combines black, wavy hair; winged eyeliner; and dark lipstick, suggesting that the wearer is both intimidating and vulnerable. “I have very specific ideas about beauty and how we manipulate our appearances,” Zelaya told me. “I’m intrigued by this idea that women do not have to be soft; they can be self-directed, with control over their identity.”
As a first generation Honduran American, she has always identified both with the culture of her immigrant parents and the Anglo-driven world in which she grew up. Brownskinned Barbies didn’t exist yet when she was a child, but she found a model for what a strong Latina could look like in her mother’s red lipstick and the darker chola style of her older sister.
The pop-art style of her imagery harkens to the 1970s, when her parents immigrated to the U.S. Her floral patterns symbolize the women in her family, all of whom are named for various flowers.
“It is nice and meaningful that I’ve finally developed my work into something that is specific to me, and recogniz able,” she said. “Each time I’m laying down these graphic floral patterns, it’s rhythmic and methodical, very soothing,” she said. “Almost like the way my sister was applying mascara: intentional. It’s almost mystical to me, like protection.”
Small ceramics that translate ideas from her paintings into three dimensions “sprout” from long tables covered in Astroturf in the center of Art League Houston’s large gallery. While the paintings are decidedly in-your-face, the intimate scale of the ceramics makes them seem more inwardly focused. They’re playfully endearing. Even — dare I say it? — adorable. Emerging above the faux grass, they could be read either as flowers or thriving dandelions, a weed Zelaya admires for its usefulness, unique leaves and resilience. A few are flower pots that hold living houseplants, reminding viewers that Zelaya’s art represents living things. Some of the ceramics lie flat like puddles, making me think, less happily, of bodies on the ground.
All of the show’s works respond directly “to everything we’ve been going through, which is surreal,” Zelaya said. Her female figures may be cholas, but the anxieties they convey aren’t race or gender specific. When I shared my initial reaction to the spirit of her work, and how I couldn’t leave behind the gendered overtones of politics, she pointed out that floral motifs can also be read as biological metaphors, signifying female anatomy. The loss of reproductive rights “affects all of us,” not just women, she said.