More about Kandace Creel Falcón
Bio:
Kandace Creel Falcón, Ph.D. (she/they/their) is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar, writer, and visual artist. Their life’s passion grounds the power of narrative for social transformation. As a Xicanx femme feminist, KCF’s work is driven to disrupt conventional notions related to femininity and domesticity. Drawn to interdisciplinary inquiry and mixed-media methods of painting, fabric arts, and writing KCF brings together various mediums to make sense of the world around them. She lives and works in rural Erhard, MN.
__________
Statement:
Kitchen Saints is a series of thirteen original oil paintings on found wood. These paintings represent my desire to explore how I, as a queer person raised Catholic, can interrogate Western art history alongside my personal history. I salvaged wood boards from rural sites in Minnesota to allude to the history of wood altarpieces in the Catholic Church, and to honor the lineage of retablo paintings of Northern Mexico and the US Southwest. Growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, saintly iconography was my visual home. My focus on Mexican foods in my home provides personal healing and comfort in a world not always welcoming of difference. My artistic practice is deeply interested in the blurring of private/public spaces. Through creating decorative paintings, Kitchen Saints is a way for me to explore the public and private considerations that we make related to our food consumption. While hot sauces are commodities purchased in public, they often adorn our private eating spaces. They represent convenience, our global capitalist moment in time, and perhaps most surprisingly are not simply benign ingredients. Instead, hot sauce and Mexican food are filled with cultural meanings claimed by those whose cultures eat and enjoy spice as a part of the cuisine but also imposed upon them by broader political, cultural and social forces. Ultimately, by sanctifying hot sauces that bring flavor to our lives, I encourage deeper relationships between us and our food.
*Material support for the creation of the Kitchen Saints paintings was funded in part by a grant from the Lake Region Arts Council with McKnight Foundation funding.
**Photographs of art taken by Daniel Broten
instagram: @ArtofKCF