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ABOUT

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

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PAINTING

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PRINT MEDIA & PHOTOGRAPHY

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SCULPTURE

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VISUAL NARRATIVE

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@bu_visualarts

@bu_graphicdesign

@bostonpainting

@pmp.bu
@bostonsculpture
@buvisualnarrative

@saraibustos_

she/her

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Sarai Bustos

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In my large-scale oil paintings, I negotiate what it means to use mapmaking as a guide to create imaginary places and abstract spaces that explore my family, identity, and spirituality as a first-generation Mexican American. By painting on raw canvas, I engage in the soak-staining and resistance of ink, oils, and oil paint to create biomorphic shapes through various viscosities and intimate marks.

By working on large canvases and through my bodily relationship to scale, drawing, and movement, I discover unlocatable landforms through an improvisational process of mapping imaginary places. My forms and dotted lines reflect my longing to locate myself as a whole. I wander through external routes, leaving and entering boundaryless forms and color fields. These metaphorical journeys suggest past explorations and passages that have guided me across internal boundaries.

I use culture-specific imagery to signal my community and reclaim the struggles of not being recognized. By engaging with these forms, I place myself as a small protagonist in a large world, signaling my intuition to guide me. Navigating these organic forms leads me across open or closed barriers of pink-earth color fields. There, I trace my different drawing methods to create maps that ground me when I wander between cultures. The scale and materiality of the paintings call on the viewer to feel and trace the known and unknown dotted lines and locations. 

Moments of raw canvas are left untouched, signaling that all areas of the map have not been discovered yet, questioning my intuition that has guided me to discover the painted areas. I wonder about decolonizing the idea of maps to create guides for myself and future generations into places of belonging. Bringing forward my first-generation experience of not knowing where I am, while using my curiosity to find where I want to be, these paintings function as my spiritual guides.

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