The Machine war has already begun

Yuridia Ortiz Avila, Transdisciplinar artist
(Cuautla – Morelos, México, 1982)

Artistic Name: Yuskadd

Location: Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, and Mexico City, Mexico

My life condition, the concept of otherness, living “on the other side” or in the opposite direction, as a woman, a mother, an artist. My work is another path, another way of doing things; through it, I navigate boundaries, amalgamate, combine, and mix to create a completely transdisciplinary cohesion.

In my creative process, I seek improbable connections that serve as a vital engine to explore ideas, materials, and forms that lead to my final work. I enjoy finding convergences where they are not immediately apparent, outside the usual and the norm.

The quest for the inconceivable guides me at all times, both in my artistic process and in my life. Through this, I discover otherness and decode myself. It is at this point, in creating, that I arrive at the authentic, at what cannot be faked, what stands the test of time with its truth.

This appreciation for the genuine, for the convergences that skirt boundaries, leads me to find the integral as an artistic process, creating cohesion, a “whole” that is interconnected, even if it appears opposite or fragmented.

My work frenetically analyzes borders, edges, and limits because they are places (or non-places) meant to be explored and crossed, offering the discovery of new perspectives. Even my creations employ multiple techniques because I see that by mixing them, they can be reinvented, leading the viewer to otherness, approaching remote worlds within artistic production.

I play with the absurd, creating upon the created, and thus, by recreating objects from my daily life. I give “the incoherent” a new perspective through duality and contrast, questioning the real and the imaginary.

I conceptualize based on my own life experiences; this exclusive perspective of the female vision is where the strength and power of my work’s authenticity lie. I am interested in highlighting the interconnection of my experiences with social and cultural issues, traversed by a capitalist and patriarchal system. I use words to point out universal situations that could be a call to invite the viewer to explore the boundaries of their own life.

Yuri Ortiz, better known as Yuskadd, feels she has always lived “on the other side,” allowing her to delve into her life experiences and transform them into an inexhaustible source of creativity to reflect messages of resistance and survival against everyday life challenges. Being in the realm of “otherness” has led her to new ways of working with various materials and formats, guiding her towards transdisciplinarity in art as a nourishing element of her creation, understanding that all artistic expression ultimately undergoes a complex process based on a story that is not always visible, much like her own life.

Indeed, exploring the biographies of artists has been a lifelong interest for Yuskadd since her childhood, as she observed that artistic evolution is inherently linked to the artists’ life experiences. Understanding this deep introspection in the natural disposition of the artist gave her the strength, at a young age, to make significant decisions, such as becoming a mother at 18 amidst an ultra-conservative family environment and against the social norms of her city.

After prioritizing motherhood and temporarily suspending her artistic training, she reconnected with art around 2007 by actively visiting museums in Mexico City, encountering those who would consistently be her references. Exhibitions like those of René Magritte with his object intervention opened the field to transversal possibilities. Also, when she discovered Barbara Kruger and Yayoi Kusama, she was inspired to create from an intimate and powerful place with a feminine perspective, which she had not seen in the male artists she had studied since childhood. Particularly impactful was the sculpture “Malgré Tout / Despite Everything,” 1998, by the Mexican Jesús F. Contreras, which left an indelible mark on her, leading her to tattoo the title of the work in honor of that intimate moment with art, marking her first encounter with a world that is now part of her everyday life: tattoo art. A milestone in line with her interest in delving into the life stories of artists was her trip to Paris in 2018 to meet the French artist and tattooer Maison Metamose. This experience changed her perception of this technique as contemporary art and inspired her to study about its parallels with the history of painting, curation, and the evolution of tattoo studios as new exhibition spaces.

For over a decade, Yuskadd has also learned that art extends over other areas, forms, objects, materialities, and the intangible. By 2016, she founded her first creative venture “Boutique de Botellas Decorativas,” which contributed to reducing glass waste generated in her hometown. With this, she gained the confidence to formulate multidisciplinary projects and took a complete turn in her life by starting to engage with the artistic world of the city, influencing her decision to resign from her government job after 10 years and leap into a new life stage where she began working as an artist manager. Since then, as a consequence of being a producer at Patrick Cat Tattoo, she has opened doors in studios in Mexico, the United States, Spain, and France, also being a visual producer and curator of collectives, formulating projects that challenge the stances of both disciplines, and together they founded the gallery Mixi Art Studio in 2023, a space where transdisciplinary work is created for tattoo artists, with a curatorial focus.

Since 2020, she has been residing in Salt Lake City, United States, where she has resumed painting along with other media such as clay, ceramics, felting, photography, and video art, expressing and capturing memories and emotions through her frenetic creations. Currently, Yuskadd is deepening her life experiences, exploring female empowerment, and advancing the transdisciplinary nature of her artistic process.