Abigail Lazkoz presents a large mural and smaller drawings from her series "War Stories I Have Heard." This work combines influences from comic-book imagery, renaissance motifs, and 19th c. Mexican engravings. The mural, entitled A Machete en las Casas, portrays two figures of ambiguous gender wielding machetes running past a high-rise housing complex – with art-historical embellishments enclosing the scene. The machete is the kind of knife used to cut sugarcane, the type used in many civil wars in Africa because it was the more available killing tool. As such,

the machete is both a tool of domestic labor and of mass killing. Such simultaneous contrasts exist in both the content and the aesthetic choices of Lazkoz. Her use of bold, clean lines presents a coy simplicity, but the interweaving of cultural sources with nuanced aesthetic choices creates an expansive tableaux. In a world where politics has been replaced by opportunistic sound-bytes, this work offers an alternative, what the artist terms "an activist and active memory for resistance.

Lazkoz graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Biscay, Spain, where she continued with Doctorate studies in painting. Her work has been exhibited at the Drawing Center, NYC, Arco ’03 in Madrid, Art Frankfurt, and elsewhere.

Special thanks to Fernando Renes for installation assistance.