Скачать или смотреть Canasta Mask from Rozzell Medina's New Heritage Masks series

This short video (with audio) shows an installation view of a mask I painted on a canasta (bread basket), incorporating fabric from local markets in Guanajuato, Mexico in August, 2025. This is part of a series called New Heritage Masks. (Transcript follows)

Canasta Mask video transcript:

This is a mask that I hand painted on a canasta, a basket. Here in Mexico, where my family is from, you'll see people carrying these bread baskets, sometimes on their heads without using their hands, perfectly balanced, full of bread, or churros. I've always been very impressed by that. Recently, I started frequenting a marketplace where they sell these baskets, and I found myself very attracted to them aesthetically as well. I immediately decided to paint masks on them because I've always wanted to make masks ever since I can remember, but I was waiting for the right form to find me.

Not very far from where I buy the bread baskets, there is a fabric market that I also like to browse. They sell a mixture of more traditional fabrics and more modern fabrics. The modern fabrics remind me of my abuela, my grandmother, and her aesthetic, both towards the end of her life when I knew her, and more towards the beginning of her life, which I only witnessed in photographs. The more traditional fabrics remind me of my culture rooted further back before my abuela. So in the fabric store I find a certain comfort in this mixture of time frames, which also appeals to my very non-linear worldview. So I incorporated that fabric into the mask using a technique I like to call wild weaving.

Something I really enjoy about that process is that it really helps me connect to these materials and through that material connection with the cultural and ancestral aspects that deserve my attention. I also find all of this very connected to found objects, collage, and the wisdom of chaos, which is part of several artistic movements that are very near and dear to me, such as Dada and surrealism, which, while rooted in Europe, like the other half of my family, are actually very much indicative of a Western homecoming to ancient traditions around the world.

#art #masks #mexico