Brenda Gonzalez

Brenda Gonzalez is a multi-media artist based in East Los Angeles, California. She earned her Bachelor of Arts at Dartmouth College in 2015, majoring in Studio Art and Japanese Language and Literature. She continued her studies in art through a post-baccalaureate program at Brandeis University from 2017 to 2018. In 2020, she received her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Davis. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Chautauqua School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, and Tropical Lab at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore. She was the Spring 2023 Artist-in-Residence at Arts at Blue Roof's "A Room of One's Own" residency in South Los Angeles. She has exhibited work in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Boston, Johnson (Vermont), San Francisco, and Singapore.

I am a mixed-media artist who investigates memory and the idea of Home through sculpture, collage, and animation. I strive to connect rose-colored nostalgia with elements of an imperfect present and a hopeful future. I am primarily inspired by my upbringing in a Mexican American home in East Los Angeles. I often source inexpensive materials or domestic objects from thrift stores, dollar stores, hardware stores, or my home to explore ideas of “making do” or “getting by” that may echo or directly reference my upbringing in a low-income American household. I seek to bring new life to deserted, nearly obsolete, or cheap domestic objects. The textural qualities of placemats and bathmats or the tired nature of forlorn furniture, for example, evoke flora and fauna-like qualities that inspire what I call my “creature” sculptures: amalgamations of objects stitched together by the idea that perhaps entities that are half memory and half make-believe may quell present-day anxieties. In my animations, I activate the malleable components of my sculptures to explore the types of spaces these creatures inhabit and their reasons for existing in the first place. I question what may make a home, even if at times unkempt or broken, a space worth investing in emotionally.