Alice Leora Briggs: Images of Mexico’s drug war [Alice Leora Briggs: Images of Mexico’s drug war]

In her allegorical drawings, Alice Leora Briggs reflects her experiences with the escalating violence along the Mexican borders. “My current focus is Ciudad Juárez. In this city one sees fiction in action, even an hour is time enough to blend truth with myth. I have traveled to sites of recent executions, photo-documented known death houses where members of the Juárez cartel have tortured, murdered and buried fellow citizens. (…) I have been to the Juárez morgue, witnessed the autopsy of a young man fresh from his execution, wandered among the unidentified corpses in the freezers, seen the guns and bullets and maggots and broken instruments of torture pulled from shallow graves.”

The drawings consist of a similar blend of reality and catholic myth, which she finds in the sites of the border town and also the technique she uses bears suggestions of violence. Briggs mainly works with an X-acto knife, incising a surface of India ink over kaolin clay, a kind of modified version of Sgraffito.

Brigitte Pallast

Alice Leora Briggs: Exempla Suburbia, 2009

Alice Leora Briggs: Trephining, 2009