Wixarika Western
Read time:
3-4 min
Client:
Iceland University of Arts
Industry:
arts & culture
Start:
End:
Duration:
7 days
Wixarika Western is a hand-printed zine exploring the collision between two visual traditions — the sacred iconography of the Wixarika people of western Mexico, and the dark figurative language of Western art. The project is personal. The Wixarika are part of my heritage, and this zine was an attempt to bring that into direct conversation with the European artistic tradition I was being trained in.
The primary references were the Wixarika visual tradition itself, Goya's Black Paintings, Francis Bacon's contorted figures, and the surreal, unsettling photography of Zdzisław Beksiński — artists who share a willingness to sit with discomfort and make it beautiful.
Concept
Each spread in the zine pairs two figures: one drawn from the flat, symbolic language of Wixarika art — bold silhouettes, spirit animals, the sacred deer as a recurring motif — and one rendered in a loose Western figurative style, anatomically human and emotionally exposed. The two never fully merge. They occupy the same page, face each other, sometimes overlap — but remain distinct. That tension is the point.
Alongside the deer, a lamb appears drawn in the Wixarika style — a nod to Icelandic culture and to the lamb's deep roots in Western art as a symbol of sacrifice and the sacred. Three cultural threads, one visual language.
The Western figures draw on a lineage of artists unafraid of darkness — Goya's raw humanity, Bacon's contorted flesh, Beksiński's dreamlike dread. What connects them is an insistence on the body as something volatile, something that carries weight beyond the physical. The Wixarika figures carry a different kind of weight — spiritual, symbolic, ancient. Putting them on the same page asks whether those two ways of understanding the human form can coexist.
The cover puts my own face behind a Wixarika spirit figure. It is the most direct statement of what the project is about: two things that are both mine, looking at each other.
