Dimelza Broche

As a disabled female artist, my work is focused on the relationship between my disabled body and the standards for beauty and normalcy. With this project, my intention is to represent my physical disability and to place the viewer in my perspective and show them how I perceive my body and that of others from my wheelchair, and vice versa. With my work I want to take on the challenge of depicting the world as I see and experience it on a daily basis. I want the viewer to feel they are part of the scene, to place them in my shoes, or in this case, my wheels. My goal is to make the viewer feel the joy, frustration, pain, and desires the same way I experience those feelings as a wheelchair user. The way I approach the composition in my work is by painting the world I see around me using a colorful palette and adding some symbolism to the reality of the scenes. This new body of work retains the richness in color that my previous work has but it shifts from whimsical surrealism in order to show bumps in the skin, and scars. With these paintings I do not wish to simply portrait myself as someone in a wheelchair, I want to confront the viewer with images that at first glance might looks like depictions of someone who is abled body. The reasoning behind this is to honor myself as someone who even with physical limitations can still pretty much do what abled body people can do, it just might take me a little longer. I expect my work to not be inspirational in a superficial way but to instill different feelings in the viewer, may those feeling be negative or positive ones. I want them to question their physical privileges or lack of, to wonder about their past, present, and what is to come in the future as their bodies age and decay. ** Dimelza is a Cuban-American artist residing in Jacksonville, Florida. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Florida and a Master's degree from the University of Georgia. Broche has exhibited her work at Manifest Gallery, Marcia Wood Gallery, Era Contemporary Gallery, The Cummer Museum of Arts & Gardens, and at the S. Dillon Ripley Center, Washington, DC. And most recently one of her paintings was part of the UNF Alumni exhibition at MOCA museum in Jacksonville, FL. ** Dimelza Broche is a Cuban-American artist residing in Jacksonville, Florida. She has a Bachelor's degree from the University of North Florida and a Master's from the University of Georgia. She has exhibited work at Manifest Gallery, Marcia Wood Gallery, Era Contemporary Gallery, The Cummer Museum of Arts & Gardens, the S. Dillon Ripley Center, Washington, DC, and most recently at MOCA in Jacksonville, Fl. In 2011 she was the Grand Prize recipient of Momentum: a National Juried Exhibit for Emerging Artists with Disabilities, and a recipient of The Willson Center Graduate Research Award in 2019. Dimelza Broche www.Dimelzabroche.com