Mercedes Gonzalez-Luna (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1997). Currently living and working in Mexico City, is an emerging artist who truly embodies the spirit of multidisciplinarity, through her explorations of fashion, photography and conceptual art.
Gonzalez-Luna's upbringing in Guadalajara, Mexico was intimately intertwined with architecture and design, as almost by accident, she was exposed to modernist architecture through her family’s work, whom awakened a deep interest in design, art and other cultural expressions. The artist later moved to Mexico’s capital during her early adulthood in order to attend a Fashion and Textile Design bachelor. As with many internal migrants, Gonzalez-Luna’s life shifted from stability to a constant transit between apartments, friend groups, ideologies and the cultural references of the two cities. A condition that perhaps, created a need to collect and register quotidian moments, from rocks in a garden, to tiles in an apartment floor. Such, constant and concurrently both systematic and curated immortalisation of moments has been at the center of her practice ever since. As in her 2017 series of T-shirts“ “Which featured images of the sky in different days and cities, promoted by the artist as “SE VENDEN ESTRELLAS Y PEDAZOS DE CIELO” (STARS AND PIECES OF THE SKY FOR SALE)
However, throughout her degree, Gonzalez-Luna decided to shun a traditional high fashion career, fueled by a desire to explore other mediums such as photography and fine art, and blur the lines at their intersections.
Throughout her photographic works, images of seemingly in trascendental spaces such as airports, are often intervened with small, round stickers of primary colors (the kind that can be easily acquired in office supplies shops) which have become a signature of sorts for the artists, the only constant in a collection of images that is diverse in both themes and formal composition, a constant in a life that is always in motion, a statement: I am a passenger but I was there then, and i'm here now.
However, fashion is still a concern for Gonzalez-Luna, albeit through a new focus, which understands the body as a canvas for re-interpretation in a quasi-sculptural manner.
This is evident in a series of tops and dresses, created from 2020 onwards which are created from defective socks which would have otherwise gone to landfill.
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text by: Alonso Araujo
