Threshold Gallery
On view: January 3 - March 30, 2025
OPening Reception Friday: January 17; 6:30-9pm
portales (detail), 2024
Featured in the Threshold gallery is a body of recent prints by Gabi Estrada collectively titled portales. About this work, Gabi offered this:
As my work and I evolve, I am beginning to confront what a portrait can be without the depiction of faces. How can I represent my family in less literal ways that still hold their memory? In response to this, I am thinking about hands as extensions of my people’s identities. Beyond literally holding objects, hands are vessels to hold memories, love, and pain. They are a significant tool in everyone’s life, more intensely used by some than others. The wrinkles, scars, and calluses that comprise a hand make up the portrait of a person, more than the face may ever be able to tell. In a way, portraits of hands can feel more intimate than a person’s face; they are not often paid much attention to by passersby, only those lucky enough to be cared for, prayed for, and given affection by the hands.
I am thinking of these prints as portals. For a variety of reasons, we cannot always physically be with our loved ones and hold their hands. Recording anecdotes allows me to channel their memory and metaphorically hold their hand, along with their memories and histories.
As you view these prints, I invite you to call back on your own recollections. How do you like to use your hands? What relationship do you have with them? What anecdotes do you have connected to the hands of others?
About the artist: Gabi Estrada is a Mexican-American printmaker, muralist, and arts educator based in Minneapolis, MN. Gabi’s personal artistic practice is rooted in identity and storytelling, celebrating the memory and honoring the existence of their ancestors and elders. They believe in the power that art has to facilitate healing and community building, which they prioritize in their artistic work and pedagogy. Beyond work, they enjoy cooking food for people they love, biking among the trees, and cuddling their cat, Tajín. You can find Gabi on Instagram to see what they’re working on or teaching: @grabadogabi