By Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Author of Borderlands/La Frontera

The paintings of Liliana Wilson Grez fill their frames with
well-balanced, un-crowded espacios y figuras possessing a clean
solidness about them while simultaneously emanating an otherworldly
presence. Sus pinturas often depict girls, young men, and androgynous
figures in still, trance-like stances, immobile, almost frozen in
place.

Their gazes are attuned to some inner voice o imagenes inolvidables de
la memoria. In Bearing Witness (2002) Liliana succeeds in establishing
the interiority of the figure, one of the most difficult feats to
achieve in a painting. Bearing Witness portrays a double or dual
consciousness. Border artists are in the precarious position of having
our feet in different worlds: the dominant, the ethnic, and the queer,
which often induces a double being-ness.

In Bearing Witness the third eye of the artist is informed by "seeing,"
a sort of detached witnessing in order to remember. I consider esta
figura as both a real and an imaginal being who's shifted from ordinary
normal perception to a different type of "seeing," one that "sees"
through the illusions of consensual reality. The watching inner eye
esta viendo como en sueños, in a kind of controlled waking dream. In
Memories of Chile (2002) there's an unwillingness to "see" or of being forced not to look. This is the subject of other paintings where leaves veil the eyes or the figure covers his or her eyes. I call this
desconocimiento,1 being overwhelmed by reality and not wanting to confront it.

Desconocimiento is the opposite of conocimiento; it's the shadow side
of "seeing." In this painting como en toda la obra de Liliana, her
textured, detailed architecture of vision makes the background y los
espacios vacíos seem like subjects in their own right and as important
as las imagenes y figuras.

There are parallels between conscious dreaming and the imaginative
process of fiction, painting, dancing, music, and other art forms. I
use the word ensueños to describe this process that all artists engage in. Las pinturas de Liliana son ensueños que se quieren hacer realidad. Los ensueños she depicts attempt to bridge the reality of the dream with physical reality. In her work el ensueño de la pintura becomes
embodied, physically real. But upon looking away from it the viewer realizes que la artista has successfully captured us in a lucid waking dream merely through the medium of painted images on a flat surface, blurring the boundaries between the reality of the picture and that of our lives.

In her most successful paintings the conscious aspects never overwhelm
the unconscious elements, but are held in nepantla,2 the midway point
between the conscious and the unconscious, the place where
transformations are enacted. Both aspects are poised on the edge of
balance, sustained and held by a palpable tension, as in Mekaya (2002),
a piece depicting a cage hanging in mid air over a young androgynous
figure with bent head and face hidden on his crossed arms over his
knees.

In creating artistic works the artist's creative process brings to the
page/canvas/ wood the unconscious process of the imagination as in
Liliana's surrealistic La diosa del amor (2002). Looking at Liliana's
art, especially the boy with two heads in Deterioros (2002), for long
periods will transport the viewer into imaginative flights or other
states of consciousness as she struggles to make meaning of its
mystery.

By awakening and activating the imagining process in the viewer, la
artista empowers us. La imaginación gives us choices and options from
which to free ourselves from las jaulas that our cultures lock us in.
El arte fronterizo like Liliana's deals with the themes of shifting
identities, border crossings, and hybrid imagery--all strategies for
decolonization. Good "border" arte decolonizes identity and reality:
that is, it teaches us to "unlearn" mainstream cultural identity
labels, unlearn consensual reality. It teaches us to "see" through the roles and descriptions of reality that we ourselves, la gente, and our cultures impose on us. It makes holes in the assumptions and beliefs
self/others/communities have about reality. El arte de la frontera is
about resistance, rupture, and putting together the fragments.
Liliana's paintings often depict someone caged, blindfolded, bleeding,
breaking down, falling through the air, splintering, and falling to
pieces. Yet even when the figures are falling apart, witnessing or
remembering injustice, they hold the clues to liberate themselves. At
first glance estas figuras are about to land on their heads, but their
bodies point toward something else, toward la esperanza of upward
flight, toward achieving equilibrium. Their minds are not in the spaces
their bodies occupy, but trying to soar toward freedom. After being
split, dismembered, or torn apart la persona has to pull herself
together, re-member and reconstruct herself on another level. I call
this the Coyolxauhqui process after the dis-membered Aztec moon
goddess.

Estas pinturas narrate testimonios of violence y de exilio. First they
lead the viewer to imagine and reenact the trauma that initiated the
fall, the falling apart, and the splintering, which la artista perhaps
experienced as a young girl in her native Chile during the dictator's
regime. Examples of these Coyolxauhqui-like images are Calvario (2002) and Hombre ensangrentad (2002), and dozens of other pinturas. As the viewer continues to look at these paintings she imagines, as do the subjects of the painting, how such a healing process could be enacted.The beauty of Liliana's paintings lies in their understated optimism. Even as las figuras realize that some part of them will always bear wounds, something in their eyes shows us that they know that after a long struggle they will cross to the distant shore where they will
integrate themselves into a wholeness of sorts. Their eyes, anticipating
the healing, envision reaching el otro lado.


1 See my piece, "Now let us Shift: the Path of Conocimiento...Inner
Work, Public Acts" in this bridge we call home" Eds. Gloria E. Anzaldúa
and AnaLouise Keating (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002, which will be out on September 15, 2002) for discussion of desconocimiento, conocimiento, " seeing," Coyolxauhqui, and other concepts that appear in this piece. Liliana's Girl With Snake (2001) also appears in this anthology.

2 See "Border arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera" which first
appeared in the catalogue La Frontera/The Border: Art About the
Mexicco/United States Border Experience, Curators of the exhibition:
Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn, Exhibition and Catalogue
Coordinator Kathryn Kanjo. San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de la Raza &
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993. It was later re-printed in MACLA (Vol XXVII, No 1, July/Auguest) under the title "Chicana Artists: Exploring nepantla, el lugar de la frontera.