Verónica Gaona doesn’t shy away from the male-dominated grip of art history. Instead, she confronts it directly. By her own admission, she notes, “My use of truck metal engages car culture’s history and artists like John Chamberlain and Luis Jiménez. The use of junk vehicle parts and fiberglass in sculpture ties to Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Chicano art.”
But rather than succumbing to forces of the past, Gaona interrogates our cultural and historical imaginations. “I reinterpret this tradition,” she says, “by contrasting my [feminine] approach with that of established U.S. male artists, infusing the abstract forms with emotional, cultural, and social meaning.”
Case in point: her sculptures employ mangled and decontextualized car parts, using them as a catalyst for new and compelling conversations about home, belonging, movement, socioeconomic subjectivities, and the impermanence of architectural spaces.
Take, for instance, Miami (2025). Composed from the front, driver’s-side quarter panel of a beige Ford F-150, the metal is dented, twisted, and bent in a fashion similar to Chamberlain. But far from replicating his work, Gaona uses an element of the iconic American truck manufacturer to level a critical examination of the American mythos of rugged individualism and capitalist expansion. Fragmented and mangled, the car part embodies both the destruction and deconstruction of completist, masculine, and nationalistic narratives. To isolate and recontextualize an element of the whole, Gaona undermines the uncontested American gestalt.
But more than simply critiquing American ideologies, Gaona humanizes her sculptures through the inclusion of photographic images. Specifically, she says the family photos she uses “reveal their value and preserve specific memories.” She argues that these photographs “shape personal and collective histories, highlighting that migrant families in the U.S. are not just bodies that labor but also bodies of transformation influenced by lives invested in diverse geographic locations.” Through these additions, the artist melds a negative critique of American culture with an affirmation of migrants, their cultural heritage, and transformations they experience through displacement.
