Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, "Understory"

Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas’s solo exhibition, Understory, is comprised of multimedia monotype and collage to construct historical narratives. Her work adapts and appropriates the vernacular of the many regions she’s called home and traces the self-conscious search for cultural roots as a first-generation American. Her work is at once both familiar and unsettling.

 Barhaugh-Bordas’s work, spanning print media, begins with photographs and drawings, often of plants, which have grown twisted and gnarled, recording in their own way the geographies they have occupied. Houseplants provide a link to nature in one’s intimate space, but are at the same time a sort of ecological colonialism.

 Barhaugh-Bordas hold a deep belief in process, and uses print media to investigate and inform the meaning and purpose of serial works, which are full of repeated symbols, definitively graphic marks, and a flip-flop of translations from paper to press and back. Rather than creating multiples from a single image, Barhaugh-Bordas works in series and reproduce imagery and symbols across multiple prints.