Yashoda Latkar, is one of our Launch Fellows and had the honor of being our first ever Solo Exhibition at La Mecha Contemporary. The Opening was June 29th 6-9 pm with an Artist Talk/Q&A at 6:30 pm.
Yashoda is a mixed-media artist from Southern New Mexico, US. She recently completed her MFA (studio art) from New Mexico State University (Spring 2023). She has previously worked in the field of commercial photography for over a decade. Born in Mumbai, India in 1990, Latkar moved to the United States in 2019. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Rome, Italy, and London, UK. Her current artwork explores the complicated realities of migration, domesticity, and the push and pull of living between the two worlds.
In its ties to identity, the lack of physical access to a particular place creates a lack of stability within being and belonging in the work of Yashoda Latkar. Self-portraiture is the method used to communicate displacement, recreating the emotional landscape of home and inclusion. Sight and smell awaken the senses of the visitor, harkening back to the domestic spaces and rituals of Latkar and her family. In her experience, space is continually shifting, and liminality means recreating memory in an attempt to reclaim a physical manifestation of home in a place where the definition of home exists within constant slippage. For Latkar, the space of the museum operates similarly as the space of her current home, or studio, it is an emptiness that requires the ritual of nesting, a place with walls that necessitate the creation and planting of roots, a space that embodies longing and belonging.
-Independent Curator, Leslie Moody Castro
