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 an MFA at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She currently teaches sculpture and ceramics at Elon University, Greensboro College, and UNCG. 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 and an upcoming solo show with the Durham Arts Council
Artist Statement
My oil paintings, ceramics, and collage explore sexuality, womanhood, and the fantastic through invented organisms that combine body and nature. I depict the body through a surreal lens of wonder and fascination, viewing bodies as foreign, unexplored terrains. The sticky, hairy, fleshy becomes something worth staring at with open fascination, the same way we are in awe of exotic plants or deep-sea creatures, illuminating the sublime inherent in the corporeal.
Brightly saturated, my palette is rooted in aposematism, an evolutionary defense mechanism in which vibrant coloration warns predators that an animal is not worth eating, exploring the complex nature of desire itself, where allure becomes inseparable from danger. Color becomes the threshold between seduction, warning, and refusal.
As a young Mexican-American woman, I grew up Catholic with taboos surrounding our bodies. By aligning the body with these domains of wonder, I am adopting a mode of looking rooted in tender curiosity rather than the critique and shame often associated with our bodies. I aim to elevate the body with the same level of reverence typically reserved for the divine, giving it the same sense of belief, mystery, and otherness granted to deities. I want to challenge the hierarchical distinction between the spiritual as elevated and the body as profane, insisting on my own terms for beauty, strangeness, and survival, constantly inventing my own mythologies to claim space beyond the limits of what I've been offered.
