Julia Barbosa Landois

Julia Barbosa Landois

Julia Barbosa Landois

Houston

Texas

USA

My work uses pop cultural tropes and dark humor to address thorny subjects like gender roles, religion, sexuality, and borders. Explorations of language, from documentary narratives to sacred texts to remixed song lyrics, run throughout my work in performance, video, installation, and print. I play with the disjunctions that occur in language translation and use the conventions of onscreen and printed text to engage charged content. Code-switching and voice-switching then complicate the relationships between Spanish and English, masculine and feminine, victim and victimizer, abject and exalted. My projects cross a variety of media to examine the relationship between the intimate and the public, double meanings, mistranslations, and the ironic and unintended experiences of the written, sung, and spoken word. I have a number of works that address motherhood. The print series M*dres takes inspiration from use of the words mother/mom/madre in slang phrases from American English and Mexican Spanish. Serious Work is a performance that satirically contrasts the banalities of parental life with the performance artist persona, using a smartphone as mediator. The video works Don’t Explain and Star-Crossed II recontextualize popular music to look at motherhood, mothers’ bodies, and abortion through the lens of patriarchal religious traditions and the divine feminine. Julia Barbosa Landois is a performance, installation, and video artist who lives in Houston, TX with her partner and two children. Her work has been featured in galleries, museums and performance festivals in the USA, Latin America, and Europe. Awards include grants from Artpace and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute (USA), Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder (Norway), and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany). Barbosa Landois holds a BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently teaches at the University of Houston.