"The 2021 photo performance Blue Flight reflects the ways Paredes draws from numerous spheres including her autobiography, literature, mythology, and spirituality, to grapple with the complexities of her identity and place in the world. Here, she stands and turns away from the viewer as if submitting to an idealized vision of nature, to a more perfect realm. Paredes, surrounded and covered by a textile embellished with the stylized form of a heron, appears ethereal, as if approaching a form of weightlessness. This bird possesses a multitude of associations across cultures — it has stood for self-determination and self-reliance, and as well, for stillness and tranquility, values Paredes embodies as she is subsumed into the background. As the artist notes, the heron is a beautiful bird but one with an aggressive gaze. In the Japanese tradition, the heron drives away plague and returns with purity, making it an apt symbol for our times. Although these varied allusions are not made explicit — Paredes has long resisted linear readings of her work — they are there, underscoring the way she manifests both mystery and meaning in her oeuvre.
The herons in Blue Flight and the botanical and animal motifs visible in other photographs conjure nature at a remove, to be sure, but for Paredes, they point to a more sublime state of being and to her deeply felt connection to the land and to animals. More broadly, the environment and its degradation is a theme she has woven through much of her work across artistic media."
Elizabeth Ferrer, 2021
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