Bio
Pilar Lagos (b.1986, Santiago, Chile) is a Honduran visual artist raised between Honduras and Egypt. Some recent group exhibitions include the SVACE Summer Showcase at the School of Visual Arts (New York, NY), Myths and Legends of the World at Miami International Fine Arts (Miami, FL); Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (Brooklyn, NY); the Atlantic Gallery (New York, NY) and The Hewitt Gallery of Art (New York, NY).
In 2023, Pilar was selected as a mentee at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. Pilar was an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT (March 2024). She was an artist in residence at Directangle Press (November 2024). She is also a co-founder of Immaterial Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective.
She lives and works in Long Island City, NY.
Artist Statement
My work explores estrangement from both one’s culture and one’s body, and I create in response to the inner conversations between alienation and longing. I was uprooted from my Latino culture at an early age and grew up in a foreign country, rich with customs and traditions that were not mine. This sense of estrangement — never truly feeling at home anywhere — is a recurring theme. My commitment to using a variety of mediums is to celebrate my eclectic upbringing, and, I reflect it across my painting and printmaking practice.
I incorporate expired medications, glass flakes, and found materials to evoke the raw emotions of pain, alienation of the body, impersonal elements of the medical industry — like my name, which medical personnel constantly mispronounce, and to confront the abstract concept of health. My painting practice also includes another subject: my cat, Cleo. While these paintings seem at first disparate from my work concerning medical trauma, images of Cleo explore the impossibility of the rendered image — a clear connection to the MRI’s and CT scans that I use to show an impossibly incomplete rendering of a human life.
My printmaking practice consists primarily of collagraphs and monotypes. I build collagraph plates from medicine blister packs, string, and acrylic mediums. These plates are not built to be archival; instead, these items mimic the wear and tear that our bodies go through as we age. Through printmaking, I also explore themes of social masking as a coping mechanism for individuals navigating life while dealing with chronic illnesses, drawing from a wide body of medical and academic scholarship. My hope is for people to connect with the work and see themselves in it.