Across Disciplines: Beatriz Herrera

The myth of modernity, new media, or any other intrepid new world entirely dissociated from previous human experience doesn’t get me excited. I don’t want to measure speed at its most basic. And it’s too late for me to become an expert in engineering or physics. But I still want to understand how the world is made—as an artist.

—Beatriz Herrera

Beatriz Herrera

LatinArte

Beatriz Herrera is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in Chile during the last years of Pinochet’s regime. She grew up in Alberta and moved to Montréal to do an MFA at Concordia University. Beatriz describes herself as “hermitic luddite” with a love-hate relationship to technology. Her work dissects the complex relationship between the post-industrial world and the digital revolution in terms of social and cultural experiences. 

Her practice is centred on the intersections between flesh and machine, beauty and electrical impulses. Two major threads run through her practice: electronic sculptures and drawing. Herrera is interested in the discourse around robots and their role as symbols of industrial and military power. Weaving analyses and reflections into her work in relation to contemporary social paradoxes, she examines our fascination with technology. 

Both in her drawings and with her “robots,” Herrera demonstrates a resistance to this technological dependency. Her complex creations, collaged and crafted from old industrial materials, have an enigmatic beauty about them. Beatriz Herrera deftly deconstructs modern life’s contradictions conceptually and physically using “ridiculous, awkward but interesting objects that act as an antenna to capture the murmurings around [me]”