DIEGO MEDINA’S BEST CHANCE for a strong Wi-Fi signal is in his car. I never have Wi-Fi in my house, he says. He lives outside Taos, where modern technology can be spotty. Originally from the Las Cruces area, Medina is a member of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe, formed by Native communities living together in the missions of Paso del Norte after the 1680 Revolt. He spends his days reading, painting, drawing, and thinking through the ideas that drive his art. Thinking is the operative word. Diego is a cerebral artist; his work steeped in symbolism and mysticism, all from deep research. And his reputation is growing, with a fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute and exhibitions at Smoke The Moon, The Valley in Taos, Form & Concept and the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, Once Within a Time. —JL
Tell me about yourself.
My family is generationally from Las Cruces. We own one of the historic homes in the Mesquite District. My family genealogy in the Borderlands region goes back to the oldest records you can obtain from the Paso del Norte archives. We can trace our family on paper all the way back to the 1500s. Before the written records, we’ve been there, on my father’s side, for as long as the archaeological record will tell us.
Aside from that, I have a convergence of so many different lineages. Most New Mexicans also have Genizaro ancestry — ancestors from the history of Native slavery in New Mexico. I also have black ancestry from the borderlands, and I have Irish ancestry. And my mom’s father was born in Oklahoma. It’s a cool thing to look at how you can look at your life as a metaphysical geographical experiment. By that, I mean all these places and all these different points in time are otherwise unrelated until they find their meeting point in you.
How old were you when you knew you were going to be an artist?
As far back as my memory can go. It’s one of those moments of realization where you become conscious of what being an artist is, and there’s this internal recognition of I know what this is because that’s what I’m going to do. The earliest memory of really understanding it as an important component of who I am was through my grandmother, my father’s mother. She was a really skilled illustrator, and she was the first person I met that had that ability. I was really fascinated to see someone picking up a pencil and being able to render with ease what they wanted to show. I remember sitting with her for entire afternoons just drawing with her. She had really unique iconography in her drawings like fairies, flowers, and things of that nature that are associated with fantasy imagery, or magical imagery. I loved it.
I went to New Mexico State University, where I studied art history and did my own art practice on the side. Then I moved to Phoenix to be a middle-school teacher. Then I had a nerve injury to my arm, and I couldn’t use it for an entire year. Art was literally therapeutic in a physical sense, because the muscular control you need to actually be able to render something was something I had to completely redo. That moment reintroduced the world of being an artist to me. Since then, I started going through different phases of that art journey, kind of like when I was very young. I would start by drawing simple things, mirroring my left hand to my right, trying to draw with both at the same time, doing some still-life renderings. Just to reintroduce the skill to my hand and arm. I moved to Northern New Mexico and worked for various institutions including the School for Advanced Research and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Five years ago, I was like, I’m going to be a full-time artist, and fully committed to it.
What’s your medium?
For my oil painting practice, I do a lot of landscape work, kind of using geography as a symbolic element to reference or articulate the mystical experience, and our mystical relationship to the natural world. Whenever you approach the study of mysticism there’s this notion of transcendence. It’s a sensory integration with that which is otherwise beyond perception. A very common New Mexico practice is the practice of pilgrimage. You’re physically going through this journey in space and time to essentially transcend space and time. And so the landscape becomes the medium of entering into a transcendent reality. Our relationship to place is a counterpart to our inner journey, right? And so, the locations I choose to depict often have historic or symbolic significance. My illustration practice is very similar, except I use a lot more specific arcane or deliberate imagery.
What kind of imagery?
New Mexican iconography or iconography related to the Christian mystical tradition, to art theory imagery. Symbol is the primordial language of the subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind recognizes symbol, and our conscious mind interprets it and communicates what it means to us in the present moment. When someone sees an image like a sword or a candle stick or an eagle, there’s an immediate association they might have with that symbol that invites them to a deeper exploration of their relationship to it.
For the SITE Once Within a Time, I did seven paintings. I picked specific sites in New Mexico that have historical significance, mostly sites with contentious history attached to them. I also wanted to look at them as places of beauty. It’s funny saying this, because I don’t really like puns, but I kind of created a pun. The Via Crucis, in the Christian tradition, is another way of phrasing the stations of the cross. I took this in a way of understanding my relationship with the route I take to get to Las Cruces from Northern New Mexico, the route I take to drive down the highway, which takes the old Camino Real Trail and follows the Rio Grande. It’s really a historically dense route. I picked seven specific sites on this trail that not only relate in a sense to my personal history but also can be understood as sites of transcendence.
What drives you? Is it like theoretical concepts that you manifest visually?
Exactly. Most of my practice is deep, mystical research work. I come up with these situations for myself, and I think about ways that I can create a visual counterpart to that narrative or inner journey that I’m going on. I do a lot of reading. I love writings in the mystical tradition, all through antiquity and the Middle Ages, up to the present. I think being an artist is easily identifiable. But, you know, when it comes to mysticism, no self-respecting mystic will just call themselves a mystic.
The mystical experience is something that goes beyond identity. So, to identify as such would collapse identity. It’s self-abnegation. But being an artist is an invitation back to occupying an identity that other people can recognize. Art is, in some sense, evidence of a relationship between the immaterial and the material. It’s evidence that this person has gone somewhere, they’ve retrieved something, and they’ve brought it back. It’s the journey of the self to recover the full psyche, and I think art becomes a souvenir.
How does writing poetry complement or support your visual practice?
When it comes to my poetry practice, it is in itself a type of experiment. I kind of create puzzles for myself when I’m writing poetry, or sometimes I create, like, little clues or hidden messages in what I’m writing, and use them as ways of reflecting back to me what I’m actually trying to understand. For my art practice, I would say that the art becomes the impression, the footprint that’s left behind from the journey.
How is working with language different than working with visual imagery? Some people will insist they’re the same, because poetry is “painting with words,” but that metaphor falls flat for me.
I agree with your disagreement. Language is malleable in a different way than visual art. Language accesses a different part of our mental function. I can say a word and immediately there’s an idea aesthetic response you have internally, whereas visual symbols are a different process. Language is symbolic in and of itself, but it almost feels like it exists in a different realm. I like to reconcile those worlds. There are so many words to use to say a particular thing. You can home in on the idea as precisely as possible. With art, you kind of want to do the opposite. You’re trying to see how broad you can actually take it. Instead of trying to home in on meaning, you’re trying to explode meaning.
Wow, yeah.
Language is our attempt to compartmentalize meaning, and art is our way to immerse ourselves in meaning. Instead of trying to pinpoint meaning, we’re trying to erase the boundaries between compartments, and trying to show this bigger picture. In most cases, when you’re trying to write something to get a point across, it becomes calculative. You can look at ten different synonyms for a concept, and pick which fits the best, whereas when you’re painting something, the relationship to a symbol is going to include all these different emotions, all these different ranges of the human experience. With a word, the meaning is inherent. You can say maudlin, and that means a person is on this part of the spectrum of their emotions.
But are you leaving out the concepts of connotative and denotative meaning? And sound? Maudlin sounds like mandolin, for instance, and if you recognize that, it might bring to mind a certain music that influences your reading of the poem.
I agree completely! Either way, though, maudlin means a little sad. You can’t use that word to mean happy unless you’re being really experimental.
So if I say maudlin, you think mandolin but I think melatonin, which takes me to a different place.
You talk a lot about mysticism in your work.
There’s a natural inclination to be universally syncretic when approaching use of any sort of symbolism or mythology. Finding those moments of overlap is an important recognitive process. My primary area of interest is in Christian mysticism, but I appropriate so much language and symbolism from the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions. I like the quote from Meister Eckhart: Theologians of the world will always quarrel, but mystics speak the same language.
I incorporate so much New Mexican lore and mysticism and mythology because the unique thing about being New Mexican is that there is a very mystical practice that undergirds our cultural reality. It’s a type of deeply physical mysticism, whether it’s in the Indigenous community or in dances and pilgrimages and other practices that invite people to put themselves in a mystical place.
Even in the historical Catholic tradition here. You won’t see Catholics in Boston doing Matachines dances. And there’s so much Sephardi mysticism that gets woven into the history of understanding New Mexican identity. Andalusian mysticism is kind of a predecessor in understanding New Mexican mysticism, because it was very syncretic. You had Christians and Jews and Muslims all living in one location together, all with these different spiritual lineages that have their overlap. And New Mexico works similarly. The overlap of spiritual lineages becomes the way of relating to place.
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PHOTO KATE RUSSELL; OVERLEAF: 12TH SITE SANTA FE INTERNATIONAL, ONCE WITHIN A TIME, COURTESY OF SITE SANTA FE, PHOTO BRAD TRONE.
Diego Medina’s August solo show is at Smoke The Moon on Canyon Road.
