melissa barraza
Painting and Drawing
Melissa Barraza was born in 1996 in Denver, Colorado, where she currently resides. Her artwork is influenced by her Mexican-American heritage. Melissa explores the boundaries of fine art to include the tradition of craft through explorations with fiber mediums. Creating works that exist between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces to emphasize the unspoken conversations that culturally define spaces. Motivated to visually communicate the stories of the Mexican American experience, Barraza took up weaving. Her works became a way to speak about language and barriers that impact identity and perception of those within the community. The artist equates the tactile process of weaving as a physical relationship between the body, the fiber and nature.
Ultimately Barraza wished to negotiate the terrain of the unspoken in the Mexican-American community from her personal experience and cultural perspective. She documents her works in the landscape of the barren deserts of the southwest. (US).
