ektor garcia: matéria prima by Henry Art Gallery

APR 2 – SEP 4, 2022

ektor garcia: matéria prima Combining a queer punk sensibility with craft practices and handwork traditions from his ancestral homeland in Mexico, sculptor ektor garcia challenges hierarchies of gendered and racialized labor in works that span textiles, ceramics, and metalwork. Through processes that record the body’s intimate touch—rolling clay, knotting fibers, or hammering metal—garcia ascribes renewed meaning to ways of making and knowing often cast in diminutive roles within dominant culture. Intentionally styling his name in lowercase, garcia assumes a minor position from which to approach and revise assumptions about who and what matters. The resulting objects are hybrid in nature— sharp and tender, dense and porous—making palpable twined sensations of vulnerability and resilience drawn from both garcia’s personal experience and a broader collective history shaped by structures of power. Writing about the U.S.-Mexico border in her groundbreaking 1987 book Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa articulates the borderland as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”1 garcia grew up in this borderland, traveling between the United States and Mexico, and identifies as “a queer Chicanx world citizen, belonging somewhere else.”² He lives and works in the liminal position Anzaldúa conjures, traversing the political and embodied conditions of the borderlands and associated legacies of displacement, 1 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed., (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 25.

migration, violence, and survival. His work is constituted by knots, sutures, and multiple points of connection that are never finite. His is a process of undoing and redoing, unmaking and remaking. In matéria prima, an exhibition made for the Henry’s double-height gallery, garcia brings together a group of contingent objects that push against the terms of monumentality the space elicits. Porcelain and glass-link chains hang from the ceiling and crocheted copper-wire lace “quilts” lie horizontally on the floor, disrupting spatial order, solidity, and fixed ideas of form and tradition. Disassembled into their constitutive parts, the chains are recombinant, as is the collection of sculptural objects arranged across the copper lace. These tableaux are decidedly temporary, their set-up improvised on-site as garcia intuitively responded to the space of the gallery and his own evolving perspective. This adaptability of form elicits a process of perpetual becoming across time and place that is echoed in the exhibition title: matéria prima (raw material). The title also includes the Spanish word prima (cousin), constructing a double meaning that reflects forms of kinship between materials and maker and the potential for transformation shared by both. garcia’s copper-wire lace is a textile of intricate knots and patterns that reinterprets the doily-making technique he learned growing up in California from the women in his maternal family, who share roots in rural 2ektor garcia quoted in Margaret Kross, “Openings: ektor garcia,” Artforum, Sept. 2019, artforum.com/ print/201907/margaret-kross-on-ektor-garcia-80524

Zacatecas, Mexico. These doilies are used around the home or sold to generate income. Using metal wire instead of the typical thread, garcia creates a textile that is delicate as well as durable and can be rolled or stretched, expanded or contracted depending on the situation. His reworked lace affirms female labor and troubles the false binary between high and low cultural practices, split across gendered and classed (and racialized) forms of production, while it also privileges mutability, resisting prescriptive—often fetishizing— conceptions of cultural authenticity. Enter here, garcia’s large copper-link tapestry suspended from the ceiling that repurposes a leather working technique used to make and embellish such items as belts or purses commonly found in Mexican craft markets and thrift stores. Created from over four thousand copper links, garcia’s tapestry forms an expansive net-like structure that exceeds utilitarian functionality and enters the realm of desire. With neither back nor front, inside nor outside, it is a web that gathers past and future into a capacious presence. The copper dazzles its brilliance, as it also reveals traces of oily residue from the fingers that hammered and folded it, making the body’s labor visible. As these marks oxidize over time to create a lasting memory of touch, they register a kind of transmission echoed in the copper itself. Known for conductive and healing properties, copper also has a rich, artisanal legacy stretching to precolonial Mesoamerica, in Michoacán specifically, where garcia’s paternal family

has roots. As the dominant writing of history elides vernacular, creative labor, and the persons responsible for it, garcia’s tapestry evokes a dynamic form of inheritance that recuperates fragments of collective memory through ritual acts of care. A smaller version of the large copper-link tapestry hangs nearby and exemplifies the artist’s accumulative process, whereby a particular repetitive action yields multiple evolving possibilities. In this work, points of origin and destination perform a continual unfolding. Suspended throughout the gallery with the copper-link textiles, a collection of porcelain and glass-link chains enumerate the relational qualities found throughout the exhibition. Each link varies slightly, part of the handmade process, and the result of the multiple individuals that helped make them. For the first time, garcia invited others to join him in forming the porcelain links, animating forms of relationship that the chains construct. As both a method of construction and a motif, chains recur throughout garcia’s work as references to foundational structures in nature such as DNA or vertebra, as well as physical and socially constructed chains that bind, join, or tether. Shaped in a way that evokes human finger bones, and imprinted with the hands that formed them, garcia’s porcelain links make double allusion to the body, and suggest both its strength and vulnerability. A series of “S” and “O” forms that suspend from each other without any adhesion other than gravity, the chains are a collection of

contingent mutual relationships between individual parts. At times other objects hang delicately from the porcelain; a braided leather rope or a copper link teardrop make tangible the act of holding that the links perform. Impotent as tools of confinement, the porcelain and glass chains integrate allusions to subjugation with the potential for connection, making visceral both the susceptibility and capacity of the body. Some suspended nearly the full twenty-foot height of the gallery, the chains are seemingly impossible in their precarity. They conjure the fragility of support structures in a society where safety and protection are unequally distributed, while evoking the instability of structures that enable those inequities. Though he has used variously colored-clay bodies in the past, the white porcelain garcia uses in matéria prima suggests the fragility of whiteness itself, and the myth of superiority it espouses. The butterfly is another motif that appears throughout garcia’s work and in matéria prima. A potent symbol of the potential for transformation, the butterfly also conjures movement unencumbered by the constructed boundaries of nation-states. The monarch butterfly is a migratory species that travels from Mexico to Canada and back across multiple generations. No one butterfly ever making the full journey themselves, this migration is collective, sustained across time. At the Henry, garcia installed a dispersed flock of crocheted

copper-wire butterflies throughout the museum so that they escape the confines of the main gallery and inhabit interstitial spaces of the architecture, both extending garcia’s disruption of spatial hierarchies, and evoking the behavior of butterflies seeking safety in out-of-reach places. The butterfly has additional meaning for garcia and references the derogatory term mariposa (butterfly) used as a slur for gay men in Mexico. garcia reclaims this social dismissal, and the vulnerability and fortitude that the butterfly embodies. One morning during installation of matéria prima, garcia was listening to Dolly Parton’s “Elusive Butterfly” (1983; written by Bob Lind, 1965), the chorus creating poetic resonances felt across the exhibition: Across my dreams, with nets of wonder I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love In our current moment when threats to the social fabric are rampant, garcia enacts individual gestures of recuperation and resistance to alienating forces. Inside his installation, the potential of collapse is palpably present, as is the potential of that undoing to generate forms of connection anew. Nina Bozicnik, Curator

ARTIST BIO

ektor garcia (b. 1985, Red Bluff, California; based in Mexico and elsewhere) earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University. He has completed residencies at International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Cove Park, Argyll and Bute, Scotland; and Ox-Bow, Saugatuck, Michigan. garcia has held solo exhibitions at Progetto, Puglia, Italy; Sculpture Center, New York; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; among others. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, China; New Museum, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; and Prospect, New Orleans.

ARTIST FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

ektor garcia is a participating artist in the Henry’s Artist Fellowship Program, which is intended to advance artistic inquiry through the mutual exchange between invited artists and the larger University of Washington community. It is designed as a generative program that promotes dynamic collaboration and facilitates artistic development, aligning the Henry’s commitment to innovation and inquiry with the University’s standing as a leader in research. The 2022 pilot year of the Artist Fellowship Program is made possible by the Jones Endowed Fund for the Arts. As part of his participation in the Artist Fellowship Program, garcia was in residence at the University of Washington’s Ceramic and Metal Arts Building for a week in January 2022. This residency and the new work that resulted was made possible with the assistance of Andy Fallat, Trevor Goosen, CJ McCarrick, Katie Miller, Sean O’Neill, Max Pethe, Jinsoo Song, Michael Swaine, and Nancy Van.

ALL WORK: ektor garcia. matéria prima, 2022. Agate, borosilicate glass, brass, bricks, bronze, copper, glazed ceramic, horseshoe nails, leather, onyx, porcelain, steel. Courtesy of the artist.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Installation views of ektor garcia: matéria prima, 2022, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. Photo: Jueqian Fang.

ektor garcia: matéria prima is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator, and supported in part by a generous gift from Lee Rhodes and Peter Seligmann. New work created by garcia as part of the Henry Artist Fellowship Program was funded through a grant from the Jones Endowed Fund for the Arts.

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