Harold Mendez: The days of yesterday are all numbered in sum by Van Every/Smith Galleries

Harold Mendez

The days of yesterday are all numbered in sum

Harold Mendez

The days of yesterday are all numbered in sum

Acknowledgments

It is with great pleasure that the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College present The days of yesterday are all numbered in sum, featuring the work of Harold Mendez. A first-generation American of Mexican and Colombian descent, Mendez roots his practice in research-based travel to sites across Latin America. The artist sources images and collects found objects that encapsulate the life and significance of a place, including from local governmental archives, public spaces, and sites of commemoration. The works in this exhibition underscore a practice focused on diverse materials — archival photographs, found objects, and organic matter, such as flower petals and pigments — aimed at communicating complex and politicized concepts around history, memory, the body, and geography. We are grateful to Michal Raz-Russo for her accompanying essay which beautifully highlights Harold’s meticulous process of collecting, altering, layering and, in Raz-Russo’s words, “(re)making.” We also thank Emanuel Aguilar, Julia Fischbach, the rest of the team at Patron Gallery, and the many lenders to this exhibition. The exhibition, related programming and brochure would not have been possible without the support of the Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch Gallery Endowment; Malú Alvarez, Davidson College Class of 2002; and the Davidson College Friends of the Arts. Last but not least, we extend heartful gratitude to Harold Mendez for his dedication to his artwork and this project. — Lia Rose Newman Director/Curator Van Every/Smith Galleries American Pictures, detail, 2016 Reclaimed wrought iron, wood, crushed cochineal insects, staples, industrial work mats, carnations 3

Walking in Circles

For Harold Mendez, making necessitates accumulation, excavation, and reclamation — his task is that of (re)making archives. History, fiction, and memory intermingle in his work; language and materials are never fixed. Mendez draws from complex autobiographical and historical vocabularies shaped by his Colombian and Mexican heritage. Materials play a crucial role that serve, in equal measure, to question and reclaim that which has been relegated to varied cultural archives. Mendez’s photographs and sculptures gradually reveal themselves over time, forging connections as they break others. They conjure narratives that were forgotten and bodies that have been erased. Like any archive, they are fragmentary and incomplete, waiting for someone to translate, revive, and add to them. In Mendez’s hands, objects are formed out of a language of materials endlessly translated into and out of a native tongue. In I did not become someone different/That I did not want to be (2016), a dead staghorn fern is stuffed inside a hollowed-out coconut and mounted atop a steel rod, resembling a head teetering under its own weight. The name coconut was given to the fruit in the 16th century by Spanish and Portuguese explorers during their encounters with Pacific Islanders. In Spanish and Portuguese, the word “coco” is colloquially used to refer to a human head or skull; in Portuguese folklore “coco” is also associated with a myth of a ghost or a witch. Staghorn ferns were described in a 1978 New York Times article as “the aristocrats of the fern world,” celebrated for their ability to grow on other plants while not being parasitic. Here it is enveloped, as if diminished. As in Mendez’s other works, I did not become someone different/That I did not want to be evokes an absent body, but also a rebirth. As details of the work are I did not become someone different / That I did not parsed, it emerges as both a want to be, detail, 2016 memorial and a proposal for Reclaimed wrought iron, steel, dead staghorn fern, rereading established narratives. moss, coconut, lemon-lime Kool-aid 5

Body (2018) is a circular form mounted on a wall, like a trophy or a plaque. The object is a fossilized tortoise shell coated with a deep crimson powder derived from cochineals, tiny parasitic insects. Mesoamericans considered crushed cochineals to be the ideal source for red dye, surpassing alternatives for its dazzling vibrance and versatility. In the 16th century, cochineal dye became one of the most valuable Spanish Colonial exports from Mexico. Used largely for such textiles as royal robes and military uniforms, cochineal crimson quickly became a symbol of power. Another red figurative form appears in American Pictures (2016), which consists of a tree trunk impaled on an iron rod, surrounded by white carnation petals — a flower used as funeral offering throughout Latin America. The two works simultaneously conjure distress and tranquility, at turns restless and in a suspended state. In photographic terminology, fixing a photograph refers to the final step in a chemical process that stabilizes the image. An object that is said to be fixed is understood to be established and unchanging; it can also imply that it has undergone adjustment or repair. At night we walk in circles (2016) began with a found broken glass negative of a spider’s web that Mendez pieced back together. Like the light-sensitive emulsion suspended on the surface of the glass, the cracks now reflect and record light. The support that holds the image is made visible; the two exist as a single image, two tangled webs. The phrase At night we walk in circles is itself a fragment and a reconstruction. The work borrows its title from a 2013 novel by Daniel Alarcón — a tale of an actor undone by his craft, a meditation on the dance between participant and spectator, and the slippage between reality and fiction. The origin is a medieval Latin palindrome, in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, which roughly translates as “we enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire.” The phrase is circular, implying a never-ending, perhaps futile, task. Yet a repetitive action can also repair and stabilize; it allows accumulation of material or knowledge. Repetitive action can render the invisible visible, and vice versa. At night we walk in circles was created through repetition: Mendez made multiple positive and negative prints of the glass plate, transferred the prints onto a new support, and then removed parts of the surface by physically erasing the print. The image is both built up and excavated. Through this process Mendez allows the photographs to reclaim, revise, and affirm even as they resist the impulse to become fixed in place or time. 6

let X stand, if it can for the one’s unfound Like American Pictures and Body, At (After Proceso Pentágono), detail, 2016 night we walk in circles confronts us Cotton, graphite, watercolor, toner, vegetable at a human scale, implicating us as oil, litho crayon mounted on Dibond 29.5” x 19.5”, Collection of Lance Renner prey that may be caught in a web even as the flat surface of the print keeps us at a distance. By mirroring and abstracting bodies, Mendez foregrounds the notion of what — or who — renders subjects visible or invisible. The 2016 work let X stand, if it can, for the one’s unfound (After Proceso Pentágono) originated with a negative found in the archives of the Mexican art collective Grupo Proceso Pentágono — a document of a performance in which one of the group’s members is beaten and electrocuted. The group, active in Mexico City between 1976 and 1985, was a pioneering member of Los grupos (The Groups) movement, which sought to bring attention to political repression and violence through artistic interventions and performances. Their work came about as a response to Mexico’s Guerra sucia (Dirty War), a period

Plates

beginning in the 1960s marked by government-led forced disappearances, torture, and murders — a history that remains obscure and largely forgotten. Mendez’s printing process and manipulation of the archived image in let X stand evokes the group’s acts of endurance: a body is transformed and partially erased, and only then is it pulled into politics or elevated to elegy. Mendez is once again walking in circles, generating meaning from different forms of erasure.

American Pictures, detail, 2016 Reclaimed wrought iron, wood, crushed cochineal insects, staples, industrial work mats, carnations

— Michal Raz-Russo David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago

I did not become someone different / That I did not want to be, 2016 Reclaimed wrought iron, steel, dead staghorn fern, moss, coconut, lemon-lime Kool-aid 78” x 8” x 10”, Private Collection

American Pictures, 2016 Reclaimed wrought iron, wood, crushed cochineal insects, staples, industrial work mats, carnations 72”x 48” x 48”, Private Collection 13

At night we walk in circles, 2016 Cotton, enamel spray paint, watercolor, toner, graphite, and litho crayon on ball-grained aluminum lithographic plate mounted on Dibond sheet, 72”x 60”

let X stand, if it can for the one’s unfound (After Proceso Pentágono), 2016 Cotton, graphite, watercolor, toner, vegetable oil, litho crayon mounted on Dibond 29.5” x 19.5”, Collection of Lance Renner

Untitled (Death Mask), 2015 Burned cardboard box, soot, toner, oxidized copper reproduction of pre-Columbian death mask from the Museo del Oro (Bogota, Colombia), 14” x 20” x 14”, Colección Diéresis, Guadalajara, Mexico

but I sound better since you cut my throat, 2016 Reclaimed galvanized steel, wood, chain link fence Dimensions variable

Body, 2018 Fossilized tortoise shell, plaster, wax, and crushed cochineal insects 4” x 7” x 10”, Collection of Anthony and Caitlin Gonka

Biography

Harold Mendez (b. 1977) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and his native Chicago, IL. Mendez received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, a BA from Columbia College Chicago in 2000, and attended the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, School of Art and Design, in Ghana, West Africa, in 1999. He has had solo exhibitions at such venues as PATRON, Chicago; Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC; Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX; and Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. His work has also been included in many group exhibitions, including “Cross Currents/Intercambio Cultural,” Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; “Being: New Photography,” 2018, Museum of Modern Art, New York; and “Whitney Biennial,” 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others. Mendez has been honored with numerous awards, grants, and residencies, including those from 3Arts Residency Fellowship in partnership with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, FL; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME; CORE Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship. Mendez’s works can be found in the permanent public collections of the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Chicago Transit Authority.

I’m not always fitting, 2014–15 Soot monoprint on paper transferred from cliché-verre 68” x 43” x 2”, Collection of JPMorgan Chase

Harold Mendez: The days of yesterday are all numbered in sum Publication ÂŠ2019 This publication was produced in conjunction with an exhibition presented in the Smith Gallery at Davidson College, August 26â&#x20AC;&#x201C;October 6, 2019. Van Every/Smith Galleries Davidson College 315 North Main Street Davidson, North Carolina 28035 davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-890573-29-4 Curator: Lia Newman Essayist: Michal Raz-Russo Editor: Stephanie Cash Designer: Graham McKinney