Our first dispatch from Mexico City comes from Maya Mason, MFA 2017
As Fast as the Eye Can See: My Summer in Mexico City
My primary fixation
as a painter has always been the expressive power of the human body.
Thrust
into a new life in Mexico City for the past six weeks, I have been privileged
to understand and experience the human body anew, as it is approached by this
vibrant culture. Estimates of Mexico City’s population range from twenty-two to
twenty-six million—so many people that even this sprawling megalopolis at many
times feels crammed to sardine-tin proportions. On a typical afternoon,
pedestrians and those traveling by car are rendered nearly immobile by the
sheer volume of human activity that swells up the streets into a rush hour that
lasts for perhaps closer to ten hours. Bodies spill from the sidewalk onto the
road—forming a human ocean.
Curious people gawk at this tall,
pale foreigner who apologetically slips into Italian when her nascent Spanish
betrays her; I am acutely aware of my failure to disguise myself into a person
who is native to this space, despite my tents of flowery and colorful clothing
and the confident, unyielding stride I have worked so hard to establish.
The fascination is mutual. Though I
have spent many subway rides back home pondering the obfuscation of public and
private space in my native New York, the populace of Mexico City takes this
blurring of boundaries to a new extreme. People with heartbreaking physical
problems—gangrenous limbs, hydrocephalus, and debilitating elephantiasis, to
name a few—spend entire days sitting on the cement displaying these misfortunes
in hopes of some financial empathy. Others manage to subsist on the wages
earned from selling tortillas an inch in diameter on portable griddles alone. Every
time I go to the Zocalo, I look forward to admiring an amazingly nimble textile
artist who works tenaciously on beautiful embroidery despite having only hooks
for hands that seem to have been lost in a fire; her dexterity is something
that most people with ten fingers would envy, as I certainly do.
There is an openness and equality to
bodies of all kinds here, in whatever state of aging, health, or economic
status their owners may be. This is indicative of the overall openness and
vitality that characterizes much of the population’s approach to navigating
this urban life, as evidenced by the candor of businesses that sell mannequins
in the buff along the highway and, more bafflingly, the curiosity of whoever
dug up one of the many coffins I encountered emptied in Dolores Cemetery.
Sensory overload is another phenomenon to which I imagine most of the veteran denizens
have grown immune, from the color-and-music-and-scent-ridden canals of
Xochimilco to the walls of Ciudadela marketplace.
The optical abundance here has
forced me to live “as fast as the eye can see,” a little motto I recite to
myself in such situations, and has taught me as much about painting as has the
rich tradition of murals that constitutes some of the country’s greatest achievements
in the field.
This frenetic visual energy is mirrored on the floor of my
studio, where my tendency to generate images in paint as fast as I can conceive
of them, is evident.
As Stephen Henderson, the generous and delightful
powerhouse who sponsors this residency, and whose aesthetic flair in the design
and adornment of the apartment where I am so lucky to live and work inspires me
daily, told me as he toured me around the city on the day of my arrival, no
image is taboo here, and the media is saturated with images of violence and
gore that would require some adjustment for those accustomed to censored-down
depictions of human life and death.
Even the daily rainstorms here take on
this urgent, all-embracing temperament, as I learned most memorably upon
summiting the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan just outside the city.
I bought the only shirt I seem to
have been photographed in all summer from the woman with whom I am pictured.
She made it with a tender steadfastness to craft and beauty that is so typical
of those I have been privileged to encounter here. I will continually emulate
this vitality and intensity in my work and life in my final two weeks here and
afterward.
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