Throughout Gabriela García-Luna’s practice, she has explored photographic images in her lived environments and along her travels that are representative of the fleeting, ambiguous and elusive. While regarding photography as a means of note taking, a recording of experience and memory through light and timeⁱ, her works have consistently presented images that “elude definitive and prescriptive readings” of time, place and meaning and move beyond the captured photograph towards abstraction to question perceived realities.ⁱⁱ

In this body of work, García-Luna’s presents a series of digital collages constructed from layering and masterfully manipulating photographic details of plant life of Mexico and Saskatchewan, places she has called home. Allowing these diverse species to co-exist within her compositions, the works bridge across geographies to probe what is fragile, intangible, momentary and impermanent in the natural world, in human experience and the connections between them.

Within these layers of gathered details and captured moments in diverse landscapes and waterways, in what reads as compositions of markmaking, drawing, washes of colour and blurs, García-Luna blends in indexes of personal experience – references to family, such as in the work, Matilde, and her responses to human impacts on the world, global devastation and political conflict, such as in Franja. Weaving together the personal, the political and the universal, she reflects on “the places where existence becomes meaningful”ⁱⁱⁱ, the inclusive and symbiotic relationships within nature and the interconnectedness, not prescribed dualities or polarities, which exists within all of humanity and the earth.

In referencing the suspended, scroll, “river” works and speaking of her work in general, García-Luna offers the notion, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” Greek philosopher Heraclitus coined that phrase to articulate his theory that nothing is permanent except change.^iv In their aesthetic exuberance, like visual explosions of regeneration, and yet quiet poignancy, these sublime digital tapestries allude to the resiliency of nature and life itself and, perhaps, even become metaphors for human identity, the result of a complex culmination of lived experiences and their interpretations that is endlessly impacted by change.

Gabriela García-Luna is a photo-based multimedia artist born in Mexico City and living in Treaty Six Territory/Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her artistic practice started with photography and expands into digital work, printmaking, drawing, video and installation. In her work, she explores qualities of Nature combined with indexes of her personal history; investigating ideas of unity, separation, fragility, resilience, presence and absence and the points of contact of different realities simultaneously.

García-Luna has exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, Canada, UK and India, and she has received grants and awards from major art organizations such as FONCA (National Foundation for Culture and Art Fellowship in Mexico, The Saskatchewan Arts Board and Canada Council of the Arts among others. Her work is part of public and private national and international collections Including the Galería Libertad and Coleccion Omnilife, Mexico, TD Bank, Saskatchewan Arts Board, MacKenzie Art Gallery and Global Affairs Canada.

She has been involved in teaching, mentoring and leading community projects in Mexico, Canada, and India. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Saskatchewan and a BDes from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) in Mexico City. Her work is represented by Slate Fine Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Jennifer McRorie, curator

i. From an interview with the artist on January 22, 2025.

ii. Wayne Baerwaldt, Gabriela García-Luna: Pensive Space (Moose Jaw: Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, 2014).

iii. Terri Fidelak, text panel for Gabriela García-Luna: Flor y Canto (Flower and Song) exhibition at the Art Gallery of Swift Current, 2024.

iv. Ibid.