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“I think that there are things that shape who we are, where we come from, where our families come from and the culture that we're raised with. But then there are also the expectations of others and what people expect from certain identity markers.”

-Roxanne Gay on identity and being a bad feminist.

(excerpted from the June 15, 2018 interview with Guy Raz, NPR)

A Texas license plate, wood paneling, and a crushed Coors light can are just a few of the objects adorning the figures populating Marcelina Gonzales, Dionis Ortiz, and Estelle Maisonett’s complex collage work. Viewers are forced to project an identity into empty space through the use of social signifiers, rather than relying on rendered physiology or recognizable portraits. Each artist included in The Expectations of Others utilizes their practice to question their viewer’s expectations. They question the boundaries of constructed identities and social relationships through embellishing the human figure with potential identity markers. Gonzales, Ortiz, and Maisonett utilize the radical strategies found in contemporary cultural studies (from Feminist-Marxism to Semiotics) to question the ways we encounter and perceive others. 

Estelle Maisonett generates large scale and often immersive mixed-media collages that move between pattern and object, commodity and figure. As a Mexican-American-Puerto-Rican-queer woman, Maisonette acknowledges the complexity of contemporary encounters with social identity, and explores and deepens this complex through her composite works by challenging the viewer’s assumptions of branding. Dionis Ortiz focuses on family and community. His work explores masculinity, vulnerability, the supernatural, and religion, influenced by his upbringing as a Dominican New Yorker. His work often includes materials recalled from his childhood apartment, which transform simultaneously into figure, architecture, and celestial space. Marcelina Gonzales crafts a mirage of personal memories from her time growing up in Brownsville, a border-town located at the southernmost tip of Texas. Her works are colorful, yet ghostly memoirs, leaving the viewer to ponder their associations with the contents of her stories. 

Constructing ourselves/the self is a relational process. Persistently morphing, changing as individuals organically transform, identity can be a source of pride, community support, and individuality. Yet, identity is also read and imposed by those around us. It is both an interior and exterior process, shaped by the expectations of others.