Krissya Iraheta: All Guts, No Glory

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Krissya Iraheta, “Crocodile Blood (detail) ,” 2024

oil on canvas (photo courtesy of the artist)

All Guts, No Glory – a body of most recent and compelling works by Krissya Iraheta, an emerging American-born and Edmonton-based interdisciplinary visual artist – is an exploration of lost innocence and resilience in the darkest of times. Iraheta brings together themes of trauma, religion, sexuality, interiority, and the harsh struggle to suppress vulnerability in order to survive.

Through painting and sculpture, Iraheta cultivates a mysterious and evocative world where the gruesome and the delicate marry. However, this world is more complex than bubblegum pink meets exposed organs. The works are a manifestation of Iraheta’s reserved memories as the child of an immigrant family, born into Catholicism, and subjected to what it means to be a Latina woman. What it means to question God, experience fetishization, sexual solicitation, and generational trauma. Embedded within such themes are moments of humor and sarcasm through Iraheta’s use of juxtaposition, a pastel palette, and adorable creatures with unfavorable desires – creating absurd and amusing scenarios.

As Iraheta says: “… there is a cruelty that lies within existence, within growing up, within womanhood. To grow up all too quickly and learn how to survive hardship, no matter how terrible it may appear.”

All Guts, No Glory follows Iraheta through a helpless race from fate, experiencing the highs and lows of a deteriorating relationship with religion and the cruelty of human nature. Caught in the middle are many of the confounding feelings we all have about many things in life: state and religion, spirituality and sensuality, love, and vulnerability. Fantasies of otherworldly pleasures are met with the earthliest of evils. According to Iraheta, All Guts, No Glory references the act of acknowledging one’s own insignificance while begging for martyrdom.