Sleep, 9 x 12 inches, Oil on Canvas, October 1993 (Private Collection)

Sexual abuse can happen across all ages, but molestation is strictly limited to younger children. Because a child’s penis or vagina is too small for physical penetration, molestation occurs when the child is "forced to perform oral sex, touched in an inappropriate manner, and/or made to watch the adult masturbate. Sexual abuse happens over a longer period of time and involves actual physical penetration, in addition to everything that is included in molestation.

Lollipop, 7 x 10 inches, Sketch Conte Crayon & Charcoal on Paper, November 2010

Abstract:
This is the first academic study of the artist Pilar Acevedo (born in Mexico and raised in Chicago), and more specifically of her Fragmentos exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago (2013–2014). It proposes that Acevedo’s art tackles the challenge of bearing witness to the physical and psychological effects of child abuse in ways that help us to move beyond existing concerns within trauma theory and examines why art which uses shocking images is not effective either as art or as a call to action. This article identifies the strategies Acevedo employs to encourage the viewer to participate actively in the construction of meaning whilst avoiding turning trauma into a spectacle that makes us turn away or feeds our voyeuristic fascination with pain. The techniques foregrounded include: firstly, the use of fragmented dolls as signifiers that draw on, but also depart from, the work of Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman and the traditions of surrealism and abject art; secondly, a multimedia and intermedia approach that opens up new ways of seeing and experiencing art whereby the viewer is invited to piece together the fragmented narratives in a way that reflects the disruption of memory by trauma, and the work of psychoanalysis.

Multimedia Women and Digital Cultural Studies

Working with Dr Jane Lavery (University of Southampton) I have been studying the growing number of Spanish American women writers and artists who are working across different media and who are embracing the opportunities as well as the challenges of digital culture.

Our understanding of ‘multimedia’, which incorporates both intermedia and transmedia practices, is alert to the political significance of such strategies and so, for us and, it seems to us, for our Spanish American authors and artists, multimedia is a political choice.
The first output from this project was an article on the multimedia work of Guatemalan performance artist Regina Jose Galindo published in Bulletin of Latin American Research (2012). Our most recent work examines the work of Chilean Eli Neira.

I have a (forthcoming) article on the work of Pilar Acevedo entitled ‘Bearing Witness to Child Abuse and Trauma in Pilar Acevedo’s Multimedia ‘Fragmentos’ Exhibition’.

We are now working with a group of other academics to try to map the extent and significance of this trend for Spanish American women writers and artists to work across different media.