Presenter

Conlisk Gallegos is a first-generation artist, curator, writer, and scholar from the Tijuana-San Ysidro border region. She makes it her mission to push forth the decolonial option by customizing and hacking as many formats as possible including writing, speaking, producing documentary films, making new media art, art curation (some as live, interactive, immersive transborder rasquache artistic interventions), archiving, and compiling open-access archives and repositories. All her projects intentionally seek to stray away from required expectations or formulas favorited by coloniality as the ongoing technological contributions of minoritized epistemologies have been and continue to be often “overseen” by the limited perspective of Eurocentric modernity. Instead, she highlights the existence of the various iterations (versions) of what she sees is a Chicana/o/x “Mestiza” Indigenous spectrum of wisdom by using multiple media tools and technology to make others see, feel, and experience examples of our culturally-specific individual and collective spaces of memory and existence beyond coloniality.

With a transfronteriza (perpetual border-crossing) consciousness, she likens prevailing notions of research, media, and technology to a yonke (junkyard) from which she repurposes elements to free think and amplify individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice. Her new media artwork has been exhibited and showcased by international venues and organizations such as the ARS Electronica festival, the International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo), ACM SIGGRAPH, University for the Creative Arts (UK), the Guizhou Provincial Museum (China), the Hunan Museum (China), The Centre for Digital Media (Canada), The García Center for the Arts (San Bernardino, CA), PAMLA Arts Matter of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Human Resources Gallery (Los Angeles), and soon in ISEA (Australia) and the forthcoming 2024 exhibition at UCR ARTS, Digital Capture: Southern California and the Origins of the Pixel-Based Image World, part of the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time (PST) Art x Science x LA programming.