Itzél Rios-Ellis, American
Homecoming
2020
Art historian and cultural critic, T. J. Demos asserts that “Pyro-aesthetics spark effect, discernable too in these flaming images. It begins with the register of fear, including worry, apprehension, dread, foreboding, panic. They extend to pain, invoking agony, anguish, hurt, misery. They move on to sadness, as in depression, dejection, despondency, gloom, melancholy. And they end with disconnection and disassociation, expressed in feelings of alienation and abandonment, immobilization and end-of-world numbness.” This is epitomized in artist Itzél Rios-Ellis’ illustration Homecoming. In the top panel, we encounter a beautifully stylized black and white scene that we have become all too used to on the news: a fire-ravaged home looming over a figure in the center. However, in contrast to many dehumanized images of destruction circulated under headlines or posted on social media, the figure is not just a statistic of the many people who have lost their homes to fires exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Rather she is a personification of the emotional impact experienced. The next two panels represent this—the pain and welling tears in her eyes allow us to empathize with her as opposed to voyeuristically consuming the image of her trauma. The next three images invite us into the metaphorical interpretation of how home can construct the self, while the bottom panel recreates the top image as in an almost “double-death” as coined by ecological ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose, which Demos describes as “The death not only of individual animals, but also the death of livability itself, the latter escaping the realm of the visible.” Label by Courtney Hand
