It’s Just Me

Works by Beronica Gonzales

December 1, 2023 - February 17, 2024

Marlene & Spencer Hays Foundation Gallery

Exhibition Statement

It’s Just Me centers around themes of loneliness and independence as portrayed within Gonzales’s first apartment. Organized around the four main rooms that make up a home – bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen – Gonzales presents the viewer with intimate scenes taken from her everyday life over the three years in which she lived in this apartment on Mulberry Street. Through quilting and painting, Gonzales hopes to preserve her subjects, creating memorials to the mundane that express and resist the erosion of time on her personal space and objects and her connections to them. The cinematic approach to the panoramic.

The cinematic approach to the panoramic self-portraits, combined with the documented

passage of time (as evidenced by the works’ titles), reveal subtle, poetic narratives unfolding in the background. In examining these spaces from different perspectives, a more complete and complex understanding of Gonzales’s home is offered that is parallel to her complicated and multifaceted engagement with the thematic topics of the work. Gonzales takes ideas of loneliness and individuality and dissects their interrelation through the lens of these intimate spaces and the ways she occupies them.

In bringing the imagery of the home to the surface of the quilt, the quilt is brought beyond

metaphor and itself becomes the home within the work. Throughout the work, the primary themes and subjects are translated across mediums and recontextualized in various blends of materials and methods. Quilts are typically associated with the home; viewing the home as one’s place of comfort, Gonzales reinforces this sense of care through the plush forms and materiality of the work. However, the subject matter depicted carries isolating undertones that often oppose this connotation.

It’s Just Me chronicles Gonzales’s exploration of her sense of self by examining the ways in

which the underlying themes contradict, interact, and intertwine with one another, while using

Gonzales’s personal objects and spaces as vessels for ever-evolving personal sentiments.

Artist Bio

Beronica Gonzales is from San Antonio, Texas, where she currently lives and works. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing & Painting with a Double minor in Art History and Psychology from the University of North Texas in 2021. In 2023, Gonzales received the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. She was the Cluley Projects Inaugural Open Call recipient in 2022. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and has been exhibited in various spaces throughout Texas.