Portrait of an Artist as a Box

Diana De Solares
Guatemala 1997

A box is a metaphor for open and closed, the inside and the outside, two terms upon which alienation is founded. My work becomes at once the physical and the psychological space in which I face the alienation brought on by the play of dichotomies that hinder the search for identity and the possibility of its realization. The box becomes the self, inside-outside.  The nails are symbolic of manly attire with weapon, the nail as phallus, the nail as material nature, the nail as primitive ancestral device, and also as the piercing eye.  Finally, the wall of nails echoes the brutality of our surroundings.

Inside, the place of the jewel, the vagina: we find but broken glass in a sky-like space: My innards can be broken, my psyche raped by the conqueror, the violent, the oppressor,  but the immensity of my mind remains untouched.