Fernanda Amelie Zepeda Frias

I'm a Mexican woman, part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community. I create art from a place of self-identification and respect toward my environment. I love to express my deepest concerns and desires through art. I do it with different media such as installation, performance, sculpture, and wearable art. I do it with the motivation to create a more conscious and diverse point of view with which people can exercise empathy and further understand social responsibility. I enjoy mixing different techniques and mediums, while I experiment and document my process because that is where I learn the most.

The Panels that Conform Me

Mixed media, 80 × 95 cm, 2024

This piece represents my experience as an International student from Mexico who is part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, and the relationship between the personal and the political that exists inside a person like me. I asked myself who am I and how was I raised to engage and give back to create a better environment? And how does that evolve when my environment (country) changes?

To answer these questions I created a doble, mirrored corset that showcases my external shows of activism and community making (first corset with figurative painted panels), with the feelings that they create inside me (abstract, multiple media panels mirrored upside down to the other corset).

Each panel represents a part that made me or is making me who I am, and how in myself and my piece, they intertwine as I share my Mexican past with my Canadian preset, to create a future where both coexist. The way I do it is that; In the back of the corset is my past with the memories of my childhood and people I loved who passed away; On the sides are the past continuous with family and friends, new and old in my life from different places; In the front sides is the present with the fight for equality, and climate justice (both in English and Spanish); and in the center front is an imagined happy place where there is peace and knowledge, from both places.

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