Los Angeles, CA
Born 1964, Mexico City, Mexico
I use different media (photography, video, film, painting, baseball caps, custom cars, leaf blower machines, puppet shows, writing, etc.) to explore and participate in linguistic, aesthetic, social, and other collisions of art and culture in the shifting context of the New World Dis/Order. My work interacts with the cultural and iconographic postnational chaos. It does more than compile evidence of the processes of mutual distortion that define international relationships. It also documents the ultrabaroque ways of aesthetic production that have emerged from the global practice of cultural misinterpretation. Seduction is in direct proportion with the degree in which the political hybridizes with the popular and infects media. This eclectic art is a product of an inevitable crossbreeding and celebrates the beauty of the impure.
This enterprise rejects simplistic binary oppositions such as the general and the specific or the global and the regional. Nationalisms as well as so-called "international" purist formalisms are both dogmatic ways of exclusion. It is a model that hopefully will enable me to participate and respond to the different worlds I inhabit recognizing that our identities are fluid and ever changing; that the human cognitive process is an unstable constellation of webs, fusions, and hybrids.
1992 M.F.A., California Institute of the Arts
1986 Licenciatura en Artes Visuales, Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, U.N.A.M. (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
1981 Career Discovery Program, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
2001-- Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
2000 American Monarchy/Raza Cosmica, Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
2000 New World Monarchies, Revolutions and Alien Abductions After Maximiliano de Habsburgo, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria
2000 Power Tools, Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles
1999 Alien Toy, Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico
1998 Desmothernismo, Huntington Beach Art Center, California; Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
1996 La Casa de los Espejos y Pinturas para Turistas, Galeria OMR, Mexico City
1996 The House of Mirrors, Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
1993 Recent Work, Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
1993 Trabajos Recientes, Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City
1993 ChiL.A.ngo, Centro Cultural La Raza, San Diego
2006 C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship, Los Angeles
2005 California Community Foundation Award, Los Angeles
2004 Acadia Summer Art Program, Mount Desert Island, Maine
2004 Art in General, Artist-in-Residence, New York
2001 Artpace, The International Artist-in Residence Program, San Antonio
2000 Commission by J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, for Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty
1999 The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award
1998 U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture, Visual Arts
1997 The Andrea Frank Foundation Award Sistema Nacional de Creadores, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico City.
