Visa denial keeps printmaker from her first NYC solo show

Iza Mendoza spent most of a year preparing to stand in the room. She hired a visa broker, started the paperwork in February, and gathered her documents for what would have been her first trip to the United States. This week, her first New York solo show opened without her because the government denied her visa.

Her show “Open Wounds” runs through September 20 at cia gallery, a ground-floor storefront at 1108 Cypress Ave. in Ridgewood, Queens.

Mendoza works out of Cuernavaca, Mexico, and has shown at the Museo de la Ciudad de Cuernavaca, the Museo Morelense de Arte Contemporáneo and the Centro Morelense de las Artes, along with art fairs in Mexico City and, more recently, in Bulgaria and Thailand.

“Unfortunately, my visa application was denied,” Mendoza said in an email to Urgent Matter. “At the moment, applying for a U.S. visa for the first time presents a significant challenge due to the stricter immigration and security controls implemented by the current U.S. administration, which have made the process more rigorous and created additional difficulties for applicants.”

Mendoza said she filed early and completely. “Even though I started the process months in advance and provided all the necessary documentation, my application was denied,” she said. She said she is now working with her broker on a new plan to apply again in the coming months.

“It was very discouraging for me not to be able to be present at the opening of my first solo exhibition in such an important city for the arts as New York,” Mendoza said. “I had worked toward this moment for months and was very excited to be there in person.”

“Although I am very sad that I could not attend, I am also incredibly excited that the exhibition is finally happening and that my work is being seen by audiences in New York,” she said.

Julia Sinelnikova, the artist who runs cia gallery and curated the show, said she invited Mendoza at the start of the year and left months in the schedule to bring her north.

An installation view of work by artist Iza Mendoza at cia gallery. Photo courtesy of Julia Sinelnikova

Mendoza sent her the refusal code from the paperwork, Sinelnikova said. “I looked it up and the first Google result said it’s the code for overstaying a visa and immigrating,” she said in an interview at the gallery.

“I thought that was crazy because she has her family there and shows in museums and fairs almost every week,” Sinelnikova said. “Of all people, I think it’s not going to be her.”

Sinelnikova said Mendoza shipped her work from Mexico in a single tube. The gallerist had to brace for the possibility it would not arrive in time.

Mendoza has worked in printmaking for more than ten years, in woodcut, linocut, drypoint, etching, aquatint and lithography, and “Open Wounds” is dense, black-and-gray work that folds Japanese and Mexican imagery into scenes of women, animals and hybrid figures.

The work that gives the show its title is the image Mendoza chose to build the exhibition around, Sinelnikova said. She described work that layers goddess figures, masks, animal-human hybrids and feminine ritual, “both beautiful and violent.”

“This is like a modern Mexican memento mori,” Sinelnikova said of one print, comparing it to the skulls and bricks of 17th-century European painting.

Mendoza fills the prints with symbols and said the numbers carry a specific meaning. “In the specific case of numbers, they refer to the serial numbers used to mark livestock,” she said.

She said one piece, Initiation, traces how girls are pulled into a patriarchal order from childhood.

“This system is reproduced through gender stereotypes and roles that, in many cases, are transmitted and perpetuated by adult women themselves,” Mendoza said. “In this way, a cycle is created and passed down from one generation to the next, perpetuating forms of violence and abuse inflicted upon the bodies of girls and women.”

The women in the work are drawn from friends, from photographs Mendoza takes of herself, and from reference-image packages she buys online. She said she keeps them deliberately unfixed.

“It is also important to me that the women represented in my work do not correspond to a single type of woman or to the same model,” Mendoza said. “I want them to convey, in some way, the feeling that they could be any woman. For this same reason, many of the women and girls in my work do not have pupils. By removing this particular feature of their identity, they can represent anyone.”

Much of the imagery draws on a Japanese pictorial tradition Mendoza found while studying printmaking. In her artist statement, she points to kusōzu, or “nine stages of decay,” Buddhist contemplative images that show a woman’s body passing through death and dissolution — swelling, rupture, putrefaction, consumption by animals, and finally bone and ash.

Mendoza said in the statement that she is drawn to the tension in those images between spiritual practice and the female body treated as an object to be looked at. She ties the tradition to what Mexican sociologist Esther Pineda calls “aesthetic violence,” the pressure on women to meet fixed ideals of beauty.

Her early exposure to Japanese art came through the anime that filled Mexican television in the 1990s, she said, from Dragon Ball to Sailor Moon.

“My characters confront violence, but they also resist it, survive it, and re-signify it,” Mendoza wrote.

Mendoza printed every work in the show herself, Sinelnikova said, not through a workshop. Editions are small, partly due to space and difficulty.

“I generally make small editions of my prints, especially those in large formats, as they involve greater difficulty during the printing process,” she said.

When a large edition exists, she said, it usually comes from an invitation by another workshop, split so “half of the edition belongs to the workshop, while the other half belongs to the artist.” Once an edition sells out, she prints it again.

The paper shifts from warm ivory to bright white across the show, and Mendoza said the choice is usually hers.

“I tend to use warmer toned paper because it gives the works a different atmosphere,” she said. “My pieces generally contain highly saturated imagery, and the warm tone softens the image and creates visual balance.”

She said she works mostly on Hahnemühle or Liberón paper, 300 grams per square meter, and reaches for white paper mainly when warm stock runs short at a workshop.

The precision is what makes people doubt the work is handmade, Sinelnikova said.

“Some people would accuse them of being A.I.,” she said, describing the labor of pulling drawing-level detail through an intaglio plate as “a maniacal level of patience.”

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