Eliazar Ortiz (Dominican Republic)
Artist Statement: My process as an artist starts from the recognition and use of the natural environment. From there I elaborate the different narratives that I want to tell through photography, drawing and performance. Starting from ethnobotany, I investigate and experiment with organic pigments, which are a conceptual part that is interrelated with the narratives that I address: language and the body, gender and its expression, heteropatriarchy, racism, identity as well as the transformation of the environment through anthropocentrism.
In my pieces, I represent naked bodies as an act of insurrection, confrontation or communion of the body with nature. I am inventing fictionalized stories taking inspiration from indigenous peoples and Afro-Antilleans. Their polyphonic, Creole languages lead me to continue my Guari Kreyol, my own language of symbols with which I intervene with photography in shaping my plastic works. I take references from indigenous mythologies and their subsequent cultural religious syncretisms from which I develop decolonial futurist visions.
Bio: Héctor Eliazar Ortiz (Santo Domingo 1981) has undertaken degrees in Engineering Studies (UNPHU) and Photography (EAF, Buenos Aires). He first exhibited his work by participating in the underground artistic movements of Buenos Aires through feminist and LGBTQI collectives. On returning to Santo Domingo, Héctor was awarded an Honorable Mention at the XXVII Santo Domingo Biennial among other awards and recognitions. He settled in Las Terrenas and began to work with materials from the milieu, incorporating the environment into his work. Nature provides him with structures and metaphors to dialogue about masculinity, language and the (de)colonial. Photography is a unit in his practice, which includes documentation, sketches, installations, performance and drawings which are articulated through the photographic camera.
In 2018, Héctor participated in the 27 Eduardo León Jimenes contest where he won a residency in 2019 at the Memorial Acte Museum of Guadalupe. That same year, he was selected for the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2020 he was invited to participate in Zona Maco Sur in CDMX (Mexico Art Fair), and won the Catapult Stay at Home Residency Arts Grant from Kingston Creative, Fresh Milk and the American Friends of Jamaica.