About
Bio
Valeria “Val” Espinal (they/them) is a non-binary, Latinx curator and self-taught mixed media artist based in Seattle, WA. Their work has been shown in Pipsqueak Gallery, Push/Pull, and Center on Contemporary Art (COCA).
The multitudinous forms of life and art is the lens through which Val navigates their identity as a transgender human, a fusion of queer ecology. They seek to nurture the relationship of art and science and humanity with the unseen sides of nature.
Val affectionately refers to their pieces as a kind of stained glass. Their pieces at the microscopic scale uncover the hidden life of paint as a medium, reveling in different angles of texture and transparency. At the macroscopic level, their work brings the human world and the microbial world together on a different style of picture plane.
Using micro-photography, painting, and collage, Val’s work experiments with the boundaries of art while giving microscopy a new field of study. What may have once been sterile glass or a diagnostic test slide becomes a painting with a voice.
Val is currently taking commissions. To initiate, send an email and ask what you’ve always wanted to see at a microscopic scale at microvalevolent@gmail.com.
Artist Statement
The human scale of vision has many biases and expectations. The smaller, microscopic scale has been a consistent comfort to me, and behind the microscope’s lens I could hide from what people wanted me to be and focus on nature and knowledge. Hiding didn’t last, of course, and science couldn’t provide every answer to the questions I had for myself. Through all the ways I had to shapeshift or put on one of hundreds of masks, somehow loving and pursuing art was more repressed in me than being non-binary and trans. Now I realize the endless pleasure of bringing art to where science roams. A more wholesome body of knowledge emerges. I believe in letting the totality of the world into my work. My pieces are an invitation to look somewhere else in the same place you’ve been. Combining scales of microbes and humans with realms of art and science yields valuable insights and countless perspectives.
In my practice, there is just as much microbial figuration as there is human abstraction. A combine emerges from the flat picture planes of microscope slides and the rich textures of watercolors. Experimentation expands. While I respect and admire the important efforts of academically trained scientists, I urge every human to consider that most microbes in the world aren’t in a lab being studied or on a kitchen counter being wiped away. Transgender people, like microbes, are vilified and misunderstood yet inherently natural and part of the flow of life. Both of us have been here longer than modern society. Microbes can never truly be wiped off the planet, nor can we. We adapt and evolve and give to the world our unique lessons. It is more important now than ever to explore the multitudes we contain.
To prepare ourselves for the future, we must improve our relationship to all realms of life. The diversity of life includes the diversity of ourselves, and both deserve respect. It is no surprise to me that the fear of the next big plague or superbug is contemporaneous with the fear-mongering towards trans and non-binary people as a “social contagion.” To reduce fear with knowledge is how I stave off infectious hatred and turn to love instead. I invite you to focus on the joy of learning, whether it’s art or science or a small new way to do something huge.