Mahal Gutierrez is a Voice for the Silent Pains of Childhood
A conversation, playlist, and exhibition review of "I bet on losing dogs" by Mahal Gutierrez
Moving into Fried Fruit Art Space in Wilmington, North Carolina, you enter a soft, pink-walled gallery filled with paintings of childhood. It is deceptively gentle, but the exhibition’s title, “I bet on losing dogs,” reveals that as sweet and nostalgia-inducing as the space may be, there is something beneath the surface. In her debut solo exhibition, artist Mahal Gutierrez uses her creative practice to materialize the immaterial, to give intangible trauma a tangible space in order to strip it of its power.
Through painting her family photographs, Gutierrez taps into the universality of childhood experiences such as birthdays to invite viewers to claw through their soft first impressions.
Gutierrez describes looking at her paintings like coming across an enticing piece of candy. When you look at it, its sweet and juicy. It's tempting to want it, but if you choose to eat it, the sweet shell quickly melts in your mouth to reveal a bitter center. Walking into this exhibition, viewers are given the choice to eat that tempting sweet, to reveal the discomfort in the superficial comfort of soft pinks and pleasant family photographs.
When discussing the purpose of depicting her family Gutierrez said, “in these memories, I want to see them as happy, and I want to see them as sweet, and I want to feel in these I can love you because in these I can. But also it's sad that only in these I can love you … that's where the bitter comes in.”
“I want the comfortable to feel uncomfortable with my work,” she said. “The people that are already uncomfortable - I want them to find solace in my work.” She continued by saying, “ it's for everybody, but it is not supposed to be received the same by everybody. That is my goal.”
Gutierrez achieves this introspective universality using subtle artistic techniques whose refinement can be seen throughout the show.
For instance, she almost exclusively works from a pink underpainting knowing how it interacts with other colors to create her works’ distinct emotionally evocative feel. At the same time, the use of pink is also a reclamation of the childhood she was pushed to grow out of too quickly.
“I was trying to grow up, but it wasn't my true intention. I was being squeezed to grow up by circumstances, and by events, and by people who should have been treating me like a child,” said Gutierrez.
In the centerpiece of the show, Who’s prayin for me?, viewers can see this overwhelming use of pink. It is at once sweet like the cake that both figures stare at. However, as the viewer sits with the monumental work which hangs at 58 x 66”, the palette becomes jarring. Some viewers will look on with rose colored glasses seeing only a pink birthday, but for those that find the discomfort in the seemingly comfortable scene, there is more to the work. Through her use of loose brushstrokes contrasted with tighter renderings of objects, viewers' eyes are drawn from the figures to the beer bottle in the bottom right corner.
She invites the viewer to see the bitter reality of her birthday - it was really for the adults and her father often gave her the responsibility of tending to his alcohol consumption - ultimately imbuing the painting with all the moments of pain, hurt, and neglect that came before and after that single snapshot.
An integral part of Gutierrez’s practice is the use of music. In listening to songs on repeat, she immerses herself in the lyrics, often attributing them to her own creation. This can be seen throughout her show as her titles come from those songs. Breaking up certain lyrics across multiple works, Gutierrez invites the curious viewer to find the conversation amongst the artworks.
The show title, “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” which is taken from a song by Mitski, calls on something very personal for Gutierrez. She said, “I bet on losing dogs to me is like you're depending on a person that you know is going to fail you no matter but you're betting on them anyway because of the role that they should have in your life.”
“I want to depend on my dad, and I want to depend on parental figures, and I want to bet on you but I'm always gonna lose with you,” she said.
In an age of fast-paced consumption of people's personal lives on social media, Mahal Gutierrez invites viewers to stay with an image longer than thirty seconds. In using a carefully planned color palette, refined renderings, and intentional song lyrics, viewers can delve into this soft pink space and find the harsh edges beneath the surface of each work. “I Bet on Losing Dogs” is an ode to childhood in all of its capacities both bitter and sweet and Gutierrez’s balance of the personal and the universal makes for an undeniably strong debut.
To accompany this article, Gutierrez has generously supplied readers and viewers with a playlist of more than twenty hours of the music that she listens to while she creates, continuing her vulnerable act of sharing some of life’s most personal moments.