Public Additions Sought : Artist’s Computer-Generated Quilt Has a Political Byte to It

From afar, the quilt’s design is bold and graphic. From a few feet closer, its overall pattern begins to dissolve as details and intricacies emerge. “Monroe Doctrine: Theme and Variations” is artist Esther Parada’s first large-scale computer work, an “electronic quilt” composed of 168 laser-printed pages pinned to the wall in a solid, 8-by-12-foot spread.

The work’s interwoven maps, photographs and texts introduce the historical underpinnings of official U.S. policy toward Latin America. A 1906 quote from then-Secretary of State Elihu Root reads: “Nearly everywhere the people are eager for foreign capital to develop their natural resources and for foreign immigration to occupy their vacant land.”

In response, Parada has wryly labeled several locales within her maps of Central and South America with the declaration that they are “VACANT.” A more pointed comment from 1927 reads: “Until now Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those which we do not recognize and support fall . . .”

Having enlarged this work substantially from its original size, Parada is now looking to incorporate another layer of detail into the tapestry, using material given to her by the public. The idea of the quilt, she said, by telephone from her home outside Chicago, “instantly suggests to people that they can contribute to the patchwork.”

To this end, Parada is extending an open invitation to a very modern, if not futuristic, “quilting bee” to be held Wednesday through Saturday at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park’s Pepper Grove.

As an artist-in-residence, Parada will be “virtually living in the exhibition space” where her work hangs as part of the exhibition “On the Spot” (through April 24). Gallery hours at the Centro Cultural will be extended from noon to 8 p.m. during Parada’s residency.

“I’m hoping to generate a new work,” she said, “using my piece as a matrix, expanding it but leaving the original piece intact.” The new material she is looking for “could be almost anything, for instance more quotes--a Latin American historian might come up with interesting material--or photographs, or statistics relating to our involvement in Latin America.” And, in an effort to bridge the political and the personal, Parada said she is also interested in “more anecdotal material, from people who were in the military or are refugees here, people who have felt personally the effects of this policy.”

Once she has chosen new material to integrate into the work, Parada will digitize it using a computer scanner, manipulate it with the help of “SuperPaint” software (developed, coincidentally, by the San Diego company Silicon Beach), and “import” it into the existing work.

“The nature of the work is that it’s very fast to integrate new text and artworks,” she said, relating the high-tech process back to more traditional forms of craft. “I used to do a lot of fiber sculpture, and I see a strong parallel between fiber work and work on the computer--literally with the setting up of a horizontal and vertical grid. I literally feel like I’m weaving with the computer.”

Parada has been using computer technology in her art for just over a year, and feels like she is “just skimming the surface” of its potential. But the political themes and visual strategies of blending past and present in “Monroe Doctrine” appear in various forms throughout her career as an artist and writer. Interest in Latin America has come to dominate her work in recent years, rooted in an early experience in Bolivia, where she taught art as a member of the Peace Corps in the 1960s.

Parada arrived there a graduate of Swarthmore College, having been raised in a comfortable middle-class household in the Midwest. The experience as a volunteer “created a strong sense of identification with what was going on there, in Bolivia and in Latin America in general,” she said. “I saw and experienced all kinds of things I wouldn’t have understood otherwise.”

She said that when she came back to the United States, her association with other return volunteers changed her perspective on the experience.

The Peace Corps, she realized, had been acting as “the velvet glove over the iron fist of U.S. foreign policy,” regardless of the individual motives of the volunteers. The anti-interventionist stance--anti- anybody’s -intervention--Parada adopts in “Monroe Doctrine” stems from that revelation and from further questioning of American attitudes toward other cultures, especially as these attitudes have been shaped through representations in the media.

Parada has just spent a year researching revolutions under a fellowship offered by the University of Illinois, where she has taught photography since 1972. After examining the subject as it relates to America, Cuba and Nicaragua, she concluded that the United States “has such a hard time responding to other people’s revolutions because we don’t really understand our own, how messy it was, that it wasn’t pristine.”

Ultimately, she said she would like to do a piece linking several ideas on this theme--”our demonizing of other people’s revolutions, our idealizing of our own and our denial of our own personal demons.”

Parada’s own personal history has always played an integral role in her work. Her “Past Recovery” of 1979 joins enlarged and altered family photographs from various times in a wall-sized mosaic of prints. In another series of work, Parada molded specific texts into papier-mache self-portrait masks. This week, she is encouraging others to come forth with their personal histories, to be merged with the political history she has laid out in “Monroe Doctrine.”

As her first interactive project, she said she is uncertain what will happen when she opens up the quilt to outside input, but she regards the event as one small attempt to re-establish art’s connection to the community.