El Despertar Painting

As a multimedia(um) artist, Gabriela-Alexandra Munoz self-identifies as a painter. Through her work, Munoz intents to shed light to societal issues in minorities and marginalized communities in order to decentralized the power structure and self-definition. By using color and form as a pivotal point in conveying various societal issues. Munoz does this through a very personal level and referring to her own experiences in the hopes of making this a universal matter. As a first generation Latin-american Woman, it is essential that her work comes from utter honest and consequently experience. Munoz tries to bring these references to whatever medium she has at the reach of her hands. The work is raw, unfiltered and unrefined. Most of her works deal with the repercussions of centralized power structures, that being in the realm of mental-health, race, class and/or gender. Munoz’s work deconstructs her interior and exterior experiences in order for the audience to form a connections with the ‘objects’ being portrayed as well as the interaction. The viewer no longer is a stand-byer, but a player within the game. Without this participatory viewer, the piece would seize to exist, or at least its function would not be what was intended to be; to bring light to these issues as a narrative of the ideological and economical problems that can be found in institutions