Victoria Mercado-Lues
About Me
Victoria Mercado-Lues (b. 2003) is a queer first-generation Mexican-American artist using oil paintings, ceramics, and collage that conjure colorful, fantastical landscapes and invented organisms. She earned her BFA in Studio Arts from the University of South Florida and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she teaches 3D Foundations. Mercado-Lues also teaches ceramics at the Center for Visual Arts. Recently, she was awarded an artist residency at GROW: Greensboro Residency for Original Works in partnership with Creative Greensboro.
Artist Statement
Victoria Mercado-Lues creates brightly saturated and fantastical work across ceramics, oil paintings, and collage, using the godly imposing presence of the landscape to explore invented organisms and their relationships with each other. At the crossroads where nature meets flesh, tendrils, drips, and holes come together to birth strange life forms in her practice.
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Her palette draws inspiration from aposematism, an evolutionary defense mechanism of vibrant coloration in animals to warn predators that they are not worth eating, a simultaneity of beauty and toxicity. For Mercado-Lues, this duality mirrors the complex nature of desire itself: allure becomes inseparable from danger. She is drawn to orifices as thresholds that acknowledge our permeable nature and bodily vulnerability. Through her work, she brings the inside of the body out, illuminating the quiet desperation of the corporeal by zooming in on the glistening, soft, and wet.
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As a young queer Mexican-American woman, Mercado-Lues interrogates the unsettling, weird, and intimate. She invents her own mythologies and terraforms worlds into something tenderly curious, creating something to believe in again.
