“Gabriela Garcia-Luna, who has divided her time between Mexico, Canada, and India over the last 17 years, creates work that bears a strong relationship to land in its various global iterations.

Referring to herself as a collector of images and experiences, Garcia-Luna shared with me her first visit to India in 2000, where she spent nine months travelling and taking photographs. The tour resulted in feelings of affinity with India, a place she felt resembled the diverse and ancient roots of her own Mexican culture. Her trip also produced a collection of images waiting to be viewed and responded to in the solitude of her studio. 

Garcia-Luna’ s earlier methods of collecting and internalizing (or what Baerwaldt signified as her “index [of] personal memory traces,”) continue to operate in her contemporary art practice. Her series, “Ponds”, was produced during a 2015 visit to Kochi for the Kashi Art Residency. Layered with photographs taken of rain trees, tropical terrain of the local region, and details of chipped paint from walls of colonial- era buildings, the abstracted images come to resemble little atoms, or planets. Ambiguous in their origins and presentation, these vibrant photographic assemblages articulate the artist’s negotiation between different landscapes, and are bright expressions of her act of piecing together and caring for fragments. Using the hybridized language of photography, personal archiving, and layering, Garcia-Luna constructs little balls of colour that rearticulate our expectations of landscape art and help us move in new directions.”

— Noor Bhangu, excerpt from BlackFlash Magzine issue 35.1, page 8.