A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 25
Feelings of unrest are evident in the paintings of Farley
Aguilar, Carlos Almaraz, and Luis Cruz Azaceta: ablaze in
vibrant color, the scenes they depict contain both the
promise and realization of intense violence. Other artists like
Daniel Joseph Martinez and Carlos Rolón use protest symbols
to evoke current and historical fights for equity and justice.
Martinez’s sign, Against Stupidity, is both shockingly concise
and fiercely expansive in its possible readings, giving viewers
the power to actively engage and interpret the meaning.
Rolón’s gold-leafed afro hair pick, crowned with a Black
Power fist, has transformed a utilitarian tool into a beatific
talisman of hope for the revolution. In other works, violence
and unrest lie beneath the surface, unseen. Alina Perez's
portrait of her uncle, Tío Robert, captures an intimate
moment of grooming and vulnerability, an image that belies
the sadness, trauma, and confusion that he wrought when he
took his own life, and the life of another. For the artistic duo,
assume vivid astro focus (avaf), their multicolored neon
sculpture (and inspiration for the title of this exhibition),
a very anxious feeling, illuminates their apprehension prior to
the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Thirteen years after it was
made, the anxious feeling remains.
The long and dark history of colonial capitalism and its
continued economic oppression of Black, Indigenous, and
people of color, is at the heart of works by Tania Bruguera,
rafa esparza, Patrick Martinez, and Sayre Gomez, who use
their work to question the validity of the economic system
and the disparities it perpetuates. Tania Bruguera’s study for
the installation Poetic Justice interrogates the historical and
contemporary manifestations of British colonial power, calling
attention to how Britain would export tea leaves from India,
then process, rebrand, and re-sell the same tea within India
as a product of British sophistication and class. rafa esparza’s
hanging bird sculpture, Ojo, made from shredded and
re-stitched Nike Cortez hi-top sneakers, serves as a warning
pulled from the atrocities of the past: just as Spanish
colonialism, led by Hernán Cortés, destroyed the Aztec
Empire, the symbols and emblems of capitalism forebode a
tragic end. Perhaps freedom from the effects of white
supremacy and capitalism lies in Black self-determination:
Patrick Martinez’s neon sculpture in black, red, and green
(the colors of the Pan African flag) reads “Black Owned,”
illuminating the past and present struggle for Black economic
liberation in the U.S. Sayre Gomez’s trompe l’oeil painting of a
Carrara marble slab engraved with the words “Everything
Must Go,” reads as a call to action, suggesting that the
permanency, traditions, artifacts, and systems that have
governed the past cannot lead us forward.
As the works of Margarita Cabrera and Ramiro Gomez
intimate, iniquitous labor systems push people into
vulnerable, obscure, or dangerous working conditions.
Margarita Cabrera’s soft, vinyl fabric sculpture, Vacuum
Cleaner, is modeled on a factory product created just south
of the U.S./Mexico border in Juárez. Soft, slightly drooping
and sewn inside-out—the seams, threads, labor, and
craftsmanship are all visible—the sculpture, just like the
people who created the original commodity, is exposed.
Using the torn pages of luxury catalogues, cardboard, and
images of sparklingly clean rooms and perfectly manicured
landscapes, Ramiro Gomez inserts images of the people who
make these scenes possible. In each work, the figures’
blurred features echo their blurred status; visible but invisible
in a setting that both requires yet denies their existence and
role in American society and domestic life. Sebastian
Errazuriz’s The Useless Caste portends a bleaker prospect: the
possibility that in the not-so-distant future, unprecedented
technological growth will transform labor completely,
replacing half of all jobs currently held by humans with
machines. Comprised of nearly thirty scanned, modeled, and
3-D printed historical sculptures, Errazuriz concentrates
centuries of pain, suffering, and strife into a single image of
this impending dystopian world.
For several artists in the exhibition, migration is a profound
and life-altering experience that resonates in the work they
create. Tanya Aguiñiga, who grew up commuting between
Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California, to attend school,
uses the tension between living in two places “to operate
between cultures and artistic disciplines.” Her biomorphic,
hanging sculpture, Gynic Dispossession 2, suggests that the
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