An Echo of a Memory: In Conversation with Chelsea Ramírez
Luz y Agua; 2021. Charcoal, watercolor, and colored pencil on wood panel, wrapped in lace. 8 x 10 x 2 in. Set of 10.
“Pasó ya el tiempo de esperar la llegada del tiempo, el
tiempo de ayer, hoy y mañana,
ayer es hoy, mañana es hoy, hoy todo es hoy, salió de
pronto de sí mismo y me mira,
no viene del pasado, no va a ninguna parte, hoy está
aquí,”
– Octavio Paz, ¿No hay salida? (1975)
“The time is past already for hoping for time’s arrival, the
time of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
yesterday is today, tomorrow is today, today all is today,
suddenly it came forth from itself and is watching
me,
it doesn’t come from the past, it is not going anywhere,
today is here,”
–Octavio Paz, Is there no way out? (1975) [1]
What do memories look like? What colors do they appear in? Are they soft? It’s certainly a unique experience for each person. Each of us carries our own senses of memory, activated by certain smells, noises, and sights of color and light. We all have the “capacity to store a lifetime of memories.” [2] Yet, as we age, it increasingly becomes harder to recall memories exactly as they happened. Chelsea Ramirez, a first-generation Colombian-American artist, renders memory through a hazy style of abstracted charcoal markings, diluted pigments with lace and minerals softly layered into gentle washes on her canvases. Her works conjure an ethereal feeling of nostalgia, almost apparition-like, with her paintings activating an echo of a memory, bewilderingly familiar yet so far from perception.
Gachetála– a vaporous fog, a cascading light, 2022. Charcoal, salt crystals, coffee, and mixed media. 36” x 80” x 1.5”.
I recently got the chance to spend a weekend with these familiar painted echoes. While Ramirez was out of town, I stayed at her apartment in Brooklyn, both as an observant curator and a sitter for her adorable dogs. Her newest series, Salt Trails (2022-23), lined her walls with remnants of charcoal staining her floor and my feet as I moved throughout her space. Incorporating a diverse range of scales, from large to intimate sizes, she intricately works her canvases with abstract markings, poolings, and striations that aid the viewer in both the feeling and recalling of certain deep sensibilities, such as grace and dignity. Her paintings depict scenes of migration with figures existing in a hazy palette of “glowing blues, burnt ochres, and velvety deep blacks.” The migrants' identities are blurred and anonymous. Yet, their shape and form release a formidable strength, pulling the viewer into a stronghold of contemplation and regard.
Below is the correspondence Ramirez and I shared after our pseudo-studio visit.
October 11, 2023
Marissa Del Toro: What are the materials and processes of your new body of work?
Chelsea Ramirez: My process embraces ideas of slowness and softness, diluting pigments and raw minerals into thinly-layered washes as well as brushing the dust delicately onto the surface itself. It’s a really fragile process in which many layers come together. My drawing practice emphasizes gesture and mark-making, and these materials–raw iron oxide, salt crystals, coffee, charcoal dust–have an inherent tactility that, together, unveil gently built-up drawings and trace the sense of touch, my hand, in their making.
MDT: Your recent 2021 series, Luz y Agua, also included lace. What led you to work with lace and incorporate it into your canvas for this series?
CR: The lace itself is a physical object that is a direct memory from my Tía’s house, which exists as my family’s historical archive. Incorporating the lace connects my personal narrative with this material that symbolizes delicacy. In Luz y Agua, the works were fully wrapped in the lace and presented like small gifts, and in my new direction, I am hand-dying the lace, layering it in a way that mirrors the sense of mark-making in the drawings. The lace used as a drawing tool.
A Salt Trail–A Great Water, 2023. Charcoal, salt crystals, iron oxide, and mixed media on canvas. 17” x 16”.
A Salt Trail–A Slow Luminous Flux, 2023. Charcoal, salt crystals, iron oxide, and mixed media on canvas. 17” x 16”.
MDT: You are also working in a more muted and smaller range of colors. What is the significance and shift in your color palette?
CR: The works are a combination of glowing blues, burnt ochres, rusted oranges, and a velvety deep black–referencing different sensitivities like memories, light, and “river.” With a more muted palette, I wanted to focus on the natural colors of the raw pigments and how they connect to the ideas of the work, and how they connect to Colombia, like coffee.
I’ve been thinking about the word “river” as a verb, a metaphor for radical resistance–a “blue” that illuminates the connections between people and first memories; migration and remembering; and water and resiliency.
MDT: Several of your works have distinct mark makings, circular dots, drippings, poolings, and striations; how do these abstracted marks convey the story of radical softness?
CR: The abstraction within the works traces the visceral way that we recall memories and connects the unpredictability of the materials within my process, flickering between the real and the imagined, squinting to remember visual and emotional moments, shifting between the past and the present, and this physical process happens in the drawings, revealing figuration through the soft-layered materials. Radical softness emphasizes an unapologetic existence, and through drawing, my process is a record of making, one that accentuates smudging, dripping, scraping, erasing, leaving marks, keeps the sense of touch visible as I move through ideas on the surface of the works.
MDT: How do you know when a work is finished or resolved?
CR: This changes with each work and is much less formulaic than it is instinctual. Acknowledging that a work is resolved develops over time. I make little notes for each work at the beginning–short blurbs about conceptual thoughts, marks, and movements–and the rest is responding to what’s happening in the process. I think resolution happens in that liminal space where both process and thinking overlap. I spend a lot of time looking and living with my work, and I go from there.
Light-loving, seed-crystals; 2022. Charcoal, salt crystals, and mixed media on panel. 30” x 30” x 2.5”
MDT: I’m curious about your exploration of ‘radical softness.’ Could you describe what that is and how you visualize it within your work? What forms of resilience are you reimagining?
CR: Radical softness reimagines our perceptions of resiliency and strength–it elevates vulnerability, grace, and simply being as a socio-political resistance against colonized notions of belonging.
I visualize this idea through portraits of communities with diasporic connections, criticizing the many ways that people are forced to prove their worth––whether through their labor, or through a personal narrative highlighting struggle and hardship. Radical softness in my practice challenges this imposed burden, revealing a somber yet powerful gaze and presence that emanates out from the drawings.
The series Salt Trails (2021-23) evokes the act of crying as redemptive and regenerative. These works depict moments of displacement, people migrating, that radiate with a glowing blue, reclaiming the act of migration, or moving, as a natural and dignified human right.
MDT: You recently traveled to Colombia; what was it like to revisit and see several of your family members and the country? Have your visits to Colombia influenced any of your works?
Did the memories of your trip have any effect on the ‘echoes’ or ‘act of remembering’ you are channeling in your work?
CR: I visited Colombia last year for the first time in almost 12 years, and I went back again this year with so many emotional references embedded in my recent work. Colombia is the conceptual point of departure for me, citing it as a global chronicle of water because it has many wonders of the world when I think of water, like the Páramo ecosystems up in the mountains and the river of colors Caño Cristales. And with that, unraveling family narratives as I revisit people and the land. My visits to Colombia have felt like an awakening and deeply informed the intimate and ethereal moments in the works.
One of my first and lasting memories of Colombia is of the fog. My mother is from Gachetá, a small town up in the mountains, and we would visit all the time when I was a child. I remember it being very cold and this vaporous, gray haze that hovers at the mountain peaks that obscures the horizon line, creating this visual dissolve between the sky and the land, and it just blurs up into itself. This nostalgic softness is the connecting thread that appears through all the works and throughout my practice.
Salt Trails; 2022-23. Charcoal, salt crystals, coffee, and mixed media dry pigments collaged onto panel. 12” x 9” x 1.5” each.
October 23, 2023
MDT: What do you mean by radical resistance? Especially in relation to your use of “river” as a metaphor.
CR: When I talk about radical resistance, I think of the many ways that resiliency is defined, the ways in which value is constructed, labor underscores dignity. Radical resistance is this active resolve to just be–somatically, emotionally, historically–turning away from these imposed social constructs. I use “river” as a metaphor for this embedded protest that exists within people. River, as a verb, is a force, a mutable, flowing energy that is constantly in motion. There’s a duality that emerges when we think of water: the sensuality and calm of the crashing waves and the power of flooding waters or torrential downpours– ”river” is the woven actualization of these two forces coming together as the act of remembering what it means to be human.
MDT: How do you source the "moments of displacement” you depict in Salt Trails? Are they from your own personal family stories, or do you use external references as a source?
CR: The visuals within my drawings are pulled from various sources–external sources, family photos, sketches, my own photos, and from memory simultaneously--and within the works, I bring in multiple images and overlap formal and emotional moments to create a new visual language. For example, The drawing Light-Loving, Seed-Crystals (2022) references an older photograph of my grandmother and mother as a child, one that is very old and faded, with another portrait of myself and my sister. These two images combine and create a sort of generational portrait within the work.
Salt Trails is an ongoing series of drawings that I started in 2021, and it continues on without an end right now in my practice. It started as a direct response to the bombardment of images of displaced people and how people are shown–always struggling. As the series has developed over time, the materials and images shift. I work on a few at a time, allowing time to pass in between so that different moments in the world are unraveled on the surface. No drawing is from one reference in order to emphasize the emotional nostalgia embedded in the work.
MDT: Were there any memories that were awakened or reawakened from your visits to Colombia?
The air in Colombia reawakens a lot of memories for me, especially up in the mountains, where it’s crisp and cool. All of the visuals feel faint, like they’re emerging and submerging from the fog that hovers at the top of the mountains.
[1] Paz, Octavio. The poems of Octavio Paz. Translated by Eliot Weinberger, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson. Kindle Edition. New York, NY: New Directions Books, 2018.
[2] Dr. Francis Collins, “What a Memory Looks Like,” National Institutes of Health, November 18, 2019.
Chelsea Ramírez (b. 1988, Hollywood, FL) reimagines societal perceptions of resiliency as a “radical softness”, a vulnerable yet dignified diasporic disposition that challenges the social constructs that define citizenship. Her practice unravels expressions of interwoven sensitivities–dreams, ghosts, light, and memories–through a highly-process driven method of drawing, one that layers the material with the conceptual as well as the physical and the emotional.
Marissa Del Toro is the Assistant Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT. Since 2021, Del Toro has worked with Museums Moving Forward, a data-driven initiative to support greater equity and accountability in art museum workplaces through coalition-building, research, and advocacy. She is currently co-curator of the traveling exhibition, Xican-a.o.x. Body with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Gilbert Vicaro. She graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio with her MA in Art History and is originally from Southern California, where she received her BA in Art History from the University of California, Riverside.