This write-up appears in the summer time issue of College of Denver Magazine. Stop by the magazine web page for reward written content and to read through this and other articles or blog posts in their authentic format.
Fusing digital artwork with features of character, University of Denver alumna Cherish Marquez (MFA ’20) departs drastically from standard exhibitions, making spaces for audiences to interact with her artwork.
Marquez, a resident artist at Denver’s Redline Contemporary Art Middle, explores environmental destruction, ancestry and tradition, historical past and personalized identification via dynamic creations.
Her most recent solo exhibition, “Voices of the Desert,” explored environmental destruction and justice, pushed by Marquez’s individual link to the land exactly where she grew up. Her viewers was invited to not only look at, but to physically interact and manipulate the genuine and virtual environments utilizing contact-sensitive topographical maps as online video sport controllers, augmented-actuality Instagram filters and a choice of dried desert plants.
Her get the job done also was integrated in “In Sickness and In Wellbeing,” an exhibition at Denver’s McNichols Civic Middle Building inspecting disability and ailment in marriage by important feminist and queer lenses.
The indigenous Texan came to DU by way of Las Cruces, New Mexico, where by she earned a degree in fantastic arts and inventive crafting from New Mexico Condition University. She then attended the University of Denver and attained an MFA in emergent digital methods. Her appreciate for producing artwork started long just before university, on the other hand.
“My dad, he made use of to draw a large amount. When I was about 4 or 5, I don’t forget going into his office environment and seeking by means of his things and acquiring all his drawings and items. I used to definitely seem up to him, and I preferred to be, you know, just like him,” she states. “So I started out carrying out art from a really younger age.”
Marquez states she’s constantly prevented following others’ footsteps as well closely. “I tried using it, [but] drawing was seriously never ever my issue.”
Amazing character scenes on the covers of Countrywide Geographic motivated her to take up pictures and doc the globe all over her. Snapping shots of people—primarily her sisters—unveiled an personal partnership connecting the photographer, digital camera and subject matter that drew Marquez into the medium.
“It was a kind of window into their lifestyle and pretty much a time capsule as well,” she states. While battling to obtain topics to photograph in faculty, Marquez turned the digital camera on herself. Images, more than ever, offered a fruitful possibility for self-expression and exploration.
“I felt like I could have all these, you know, distinctive people and distinctive personalities,” she claims. “I feel at that time when I was 18 to 20, it just variety of felt like I required to do that. Id stuff is definitely odd when you’re at that age.”
Immediately after earning her bachelor’s diploma, Marquez wanted to dive deeper into electronic art, but she also sought an escape from her compact-town upbringing. DU’s graduate program provided her metropolis everyday living as well as possibilities to grow her coding, 3D modeling, video clip-activity style and design and graphic design expertise.
Even though the rapid tempo of the quarter process was difficult, Marquez fondly remembers the bonds she constructed with college and college students in the Shwayder Artwork Building. “The local community there—the fellow learners, the cohort and even the academics ended up truly supportive, and they certainly mentored me a good deal and however do,” she suggests.
