Gabriela Gomez-Mestre

As an emerging artist, I am concerned with the mundane as an essential compound of our everyday experience. In other words, the nuts and bolts that hold our everyday together figuratively speaking. My work is inspired by my experience riding the New Jersey Light Rail, the carelessness of the way people treat the tickets, the back and forth movement/motion of the light rail train, and most importantly, by the setting of each car. I’ve decided to take disposable tickets out of its context and re-contextualize it into a new environment. As my base image I have created a grid of rows and columns of the tickets used to ride the Light Rail - some are blurred entirely, cropped, or deteriorating. Overlaid is a fluid colored shape unique to each print. Lastly, I’ve added textured colored lines also distinctive to each print. My entire body of work consists of these three elements because I’ve been working in a formula of repetition.

My process started when I collected a handful of used Light Rail tickets. Some I’ve used myself, freshly stamped, others I’ve picked up off the nearby station’s floor. Using Photoshop, I manually aligned each ticket with the other, creating the background layer of my prints on matte paper that are 18” x 24”. This was a long process of repetition done for the prints being shown. For me, tickets represent the background of “real life”, blurred out due to the busyness of everyday life. I’ve decontextualized the tickets in two different ways - by cropping signifiant information on the tickets or blurring out in a very pixilated way information only familiar to those who are regular riders. The organic shapes on top were done with silkscreen ink, while experimenting with filling out areas of transparent paper (film) as well as cutting out shapes from construction paper. These organic peculiar shapes are meant to portray regular everyday commuters. By abstracting the people, I’m also seeing myself as a nameless, fluid blob. On top of these two layers, I used different colored oil sticks to show texture and back and forth movement and more repetition inspired by the motion of the Light Rail.

After seeing my work, I want the viewers to think more about their surroundings, consider their time in any space and not let everyday life become the “background” so easily. I’m inviting people to think outside the box, start a conversation, and allow people come to their own conclusions. Part of my work process is to let my intuition and subconsciousness take charge. I also want my art to invoke an emotional experience or a memory in my audience without trying to make them feel a specific thing.