![]() ![]() He was the Wanlass Resident at Occidental College and has lectured at UCSD, SAIC, CalArts, and Colombia in 2020 alone. He has exhibited work at internationally recognized museums such as the Whitney, MASS MoCA, and the Hammer Museum. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. 1981, Los Angeles based in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. ![]() In-kind support provided by Barrio Brewing Company, The Downtown Clifton Hotel, Sonoran Glass School, and Consolidated Rebar Inc. ![]() Generous support for the exhibition is provided by the University of Arizona School of Art and Arizona Arts, The Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation, VIA Art Fund and Wagner Foundation, and Arizona Humanities. Were-:Nenetech Formsis co-organized by artists rafa esparza, Timo Fahler, and Curator-at-Large Laura Copelin with support from Assistant Curator Alexis Wilkinson. Additional contributing artists, writers, scholars, and scientists will be invited into the conversations that shape and enliven the dual exhibitions, weaving together a multivalent conversation about adaptation, bi-nationality, and survival in the Sonoran Desert. The artists will be in dialogue with students from the University of Arizona, who will collectively intervene in the architecture of the Joseph Gross Gallery by building adobe “support structures.” The Gallery will become a laboratory for discussion and experimentation, with students conceiving of their own artistic contributions to the installation there or supporting the parallel project at MOCA over the course of the fall. Artists Karla Ekatherine Canseco, Amina Cruz, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya all join in at different stages of the residency period to create new work for the exhibition, manifesting across the mediums of sculpture, photography, and installation. Julio César Morales creates new iterations of his neon sculpture La Linea, while Chico MacMurtrie constellates a painting, drawing, and maquette that chart the movements of his iconic Border Crossers robotic sculptures. The exhibition, whose title is derived from were- a prefix that indicates shapeshifting and nenetech, a Nahuatl term that translates to “close together” and refers to twinning, creates a ground for other artists to show new and existing works that explore biomimicry (the process where organic strategies are used to solve human problems), adaptation, and survival in the Sonoran Desert borderlands. These gestures simultaneously nod to the complex astronomical alignments in Indigenous architectures across the Southwest and Mexico, to the violent history of settler colonialism and religious conversion, and to the resourceful adaptivity of migrants and residents existing within the matrix of a highly militarized border. At MOCA, a solar observation room, a sun-harness, and stained glass inlaid into rebar bring the adobe structures into relationship with cosmic cycles. ![]() The bricks will be used to build architectural structures that transform institutional spaces into sites framed by earth and collective labor. Both projects are centered around the process of creating and building with adobe bricks, a labor intensive practice shared by the artists with peers, students, and participants from Tucson. Were-:Nenetech Forms is a group exhibition centered around migration, transformation, and modes of survival in the Sonoran Desert by rafa esparza and Timo Fahler with Karla Ekatherine Canseco, Julio César Morales, Amina Cruz, Chico MacMurtrie, Ana Mendieta, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya.ĭeveloped by Los Angeles based artists rafa esparza and Timo Fahler over an extended residency period in Tucson, the exhibition is presented simultaneously at MOCA Tucson and the University of Arizona’s Joseph Gross Gallery. ![]()
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