I Prefer Direct Sunlight
Natalie Ochoa
June 15th — July 16th, 2023
Press Release & Works ListNatalie Ochoa CV
Blade Study is pleased to present I Prefer Direct Sunlight, Brooklyn-based artist Natalie Ochoa’s debut with the gallery. Through her sculpture and embroidery practice, Ochoa mines her personal history growing up in a Colombian Catholic family and her present life in New York City to explore themes of health, desire, spirituality, and nostalgia. Guided by a detail-oriented, intuitive approach, she combines research on modern psychiatry, occult practices, and “healing” culture to create deeply personal sculptures and wall works. Taken together, Ochoa’s work spans the realms of art, craft, and design, to consider the capitalist underpinnings of the modern “wellness industrial complex.”
Guided by her own quest for self-acceptance, Ochoa speaks to her generation’s obsessive pursuit of an extremely-online and nearly religiously zealous form of “wellness.” Rendered in resin, wood, acrylic, stainless steel, water, and fabric with digital embroidery, the hard exteriors which encase Ochoa’s soft textures are coping mechanisms made physical. Into these multivalent objects, the artist incorporates references to her childhood in the 1990s, including now-vintage toys, imagery from the television psychic Miss Cleo, icons of purity such as swans, and carefully selected words of affirmation.
Ochoa’s nostalgic manifestations of life before a series of 21st-century traumas—the war on terror, climate change, a pandemic, a reckoning with racial injustice—speaks to her generation’s stunted ability to participate meaningfully in the production of the future. “Wellness” and the resulting multibillion-dollar industry that sprung up around it, has since become the buzzword du jour, manifesting a world in which constant self-improvement becomes the only means of effectively controlling one’s own destiny.
I Prefer Direct Sunlight reveals the ways “wellness” and capital are intertwined and how the rhetoric of anti-anxiety, self-care, and personal ritual are packaged, sold and distributed online as hollow stand-ins for more meaningful action to address the defining issues of our time. The resulting commodification of wellness, as illustrated in Ochoa’s deeply personal work, stands in the way of meaningful political and economic control.
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Translation provided by DeepL
Natalie Ochoa is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She taps into her Colombian roots by engaging in rituals that help her confront fears, anxieties, and vulnerability. Using embroidery and sculpture as mediums, her creations serve as a therapeutic outlet, enabling her to convey emotions and juxtapose past pain through vibrant colors and naive imagery. Collectively, her artworks construct a distinctive realm where her contradictions coexist harmoniously.
INSTALLATION
WORKS
Natalie Ochoa
Not a Shiny Mirror #1, 2023
38" by 28"Digital embroidery on digitally printed cotton fabric
Natalie Ochoa
Not a Shiny Mirror #2, 2023
38" by 28"Digital embroidery on digitally printed cotton fabric
Natalie Ochoa
Full of Peace When I Breathe, 2023
60" by 50"Birch wood, digital embroidery on cotton fabric, acrylic rods, resin beads with mica perl powder, and wood stain
Natalie Ochoa
All Decisions Lead to the Same Garden, 2023
50" by 50"Birch wood, acrylic rods, water with food coloring, digital printed cotton fabric, digital embroidery, rattan, foam, wood stain
Natalie Ochoa
Let the Baby Sleep, 2022
20” x 20” x 10”Stainless steel, coffee stains canvas with digital embroidery, ribbons
Natalie Ochoa
Pick me Please, 2022
14" x 8"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Fuk Off ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Best Blow Job ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( I Love Being a Leader ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Most Likely to Have Divorced Parents ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Flick My Bic ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Till You Feel Better ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Spelling Bee Failure ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( I May Look Grumpy But I'm Happy to be Alive ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Take a Hike Girl Scouts ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Plague Survivor ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Martini Witch ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Heaven's Gate Away Team ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( 3rd Eviction ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Stifle Yourself ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Most Likely to Drop Out ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( I Love Obsessed ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas
Natalie Ochoa
Pick Me Please ( Most Likely to Get Fired 4 Being Late ), 2022
14" by 18"Digital embroidery on ribbon, digital embroidery on canvas