Situated within a 1960s North Miami apartment building, Natalia Chavarria’s home studio bears the airbrush works that recollect my own textural understandings of Miami’s graffiti walls and idiosyncrasies. It feels full circle as I enter the space, as Natalia once installed a work of her own in my home office—Ripple (Pearl, Fly, Web)—which features a spiderweb doused in an iridescent color palette. The delicacy of a fly, seen as a nuisance, alongside a pearl in the heart of the composition, interpreted as rare and precious, both entangled in the same web caught my eye upon seeing it in an exhibition. As I decorated a home office that was once my maternal abuela’s bedroom, reminded of my toddler days spent playing Miss Spider’s Tea Party on the Playstation 1 with her, the work became the uncanny complement necessary to fill the empty wall adjacent to my desk and a void of grief following her passing.
Walking around her studio, I am drawn immediately to the separation of work and home, as a curtain is pulled across the studio section to provide an extra element of privacy. Natural light from the balcony fills the studio as Chavarria and I speak on the airbrush, how opposites can coexist, and the surrealism of Miami.
Isabella Marie Garcia: I first encountered your work at a collective group exhibition in Spring 2022 titled Playing Shadows at One World Gallery in North Miami, as curated by Emily Afre, which showcased a range of mediums emerging out of Florida International University (FIU) art students. Then you showed work at NADA Miami 2022 and a new body of work at Dale Zine last year in February. Could you explain how you arrived at your current practice?
Natalia Chavarria: Sure! I’m from Mexico. I was born there, but I moved here really young. So I was raised in South Florida. I went to school at FIU where I got my Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2020. At the time, my practice was more video performance and sculptural. Although it is very visually different, I’ve always been interested in processes, whether they’re in the body or the environment. Soon after school, I started working with the airbrush, which got me back into painting.
As for a quick summary of my work right now, I like to take different symbols and subjects and combine them in unexpected ways to explore the relationship that arises. There’s this element of surprise that draws you in and I like the unlikeliness of two objects placed next to one another. I find it also makes you reflect about where you think about that symbol, what your relationship is to it, or where you draw the meaning from where it came from.
With airbrush, I find it really difficult. It’s very different from painting with a brush but the softness and mistiness of it really matched with what I was trying to do. I really love it and it had a lot to do with how I arrived at my current practice. I definitely mix media. I still use paint and oil but with the airbrush, it opened the door to stenciling.
IMG: You noted working in performance during your undergraduate years. Does it inform your mixed media works or the work you are currently creating?
NC: Yeah, I was thinking about that because, visually, it’s super different in being a medium that involves using my body. Throughout all my work, there’s these interesting things that have duality or really opposite pools. In my video work, it’s more about the sensual and the grotesque and that space in between. Opposites can feel like you’re in a circle—they’re at a point next to each other and to a point where the further apart they are, the more likely they are to meet in the middle. Opposites tend to be really similar in a lot of ways.
IMG: Does Miami as an arts community and physical landscape impact your studio practice?
NC: You know, as people are artists, your environment really affects you. I love Miami as a city, but I’ve always thought of it as a really strange place. On one side, it’s kind of this paradise, it’s a vacation spot. For some reason, celebrities always get arrested here, and it’s these strange playgrounds that add to a surreal personality.
But then there’s real people here and real things happening. A lot of intense problems. Over all of this, there’s this impending doom. As you know, it’s really affected by climate and we are seeing really intense differences. All of these things together create this in-between place. That’s one thing that I do find makes it into my work, maybe not directly, but the feeling of how surreal Miami can be.
Then there’s the Everglades, which is completely unique. Because my work takes from nature, I find myself researching a lot about the Everglades. Before, when I was younger, before I knew I wanted to make art, I wanted to be a field research biologist. Really, I’ve always loved nature and I’ve always wanted to know and write about it. The interesting thing is that part of that research, at some point, bumps into the meaning that people have assigned to these things, whether it’s an animal or plant or the water cycle.
IMG: I resonate in that fascination with the Everglades, and how special it is to reside near its ecosystem. Can I ask about this piece you’re working on right now?
NC: Yes! So this one’s a little bit older that I brought back. The moth and the lightning are interesting to me, you know, the sort of attraction they are both drawn towards and also produce in others. The attractions to light in both can be a dangerous thing, for the moth itself and for those in proximity to lightning. I was thinking about sadness. There’s definitely an intensity I’m exploring in that feeling.
IMG: You say surreal, and now looking at your work more and more, that’s definitely the energy I witness, especially when seeing objects like a pearl tucked in the middle of a spider web or a crying face within a raindrop. With this new body of work you’re actively starting to begin, you mentioned much of it will be featured in a solo exhibition in the fall correct?
NC: Formerly known as Club Gallery, it’s going to be a presentation at Baker—Hall Gallery. I’m really excited about it because there’s been a couple of things that I want to explore, primarily the idea of the unexplainable. There’s certain things like love, or when you look into a pet’s eyes, and there’s this undeniable understanding. Things are, again, kind of surreal and hard to explain. I think they’re going to be a little bit more humorous, and it’ll be mostly paintings and works on paper.
