Luis G. Hernandez + Ed Gomez
UN/belonginng in the Land of Milk and Honey
March 11 - April 15
presented by the MexiCali Biennial
UN/belonging in the Land of Milk & Honey was an exhibition of the work of Luis G. Hernandez and Ed Gomez guest curated by Emmanuel Ortega. The exhibition consisted of a number of landscape paintings and a large scale sculpture by Ed Gomez along with a series of drawings and a neon text work by Luis G. Hernandez.
Under the rhetoric of empire, and to use the words of scholar Hazel Carby, belonging functions as a way to settle with colonization—giving us the impression that its violence has somehow been resolved. Throughout history, the role of landscape representation has functioned similarly; it has sought to enclose nature as a place where bodies are meant to belong “naturally.” But the dimensions of how, why, when and who belongs in these spaces has shifted through time. The distortion consists precisely in naturalizing which identities belong (and do not belong) to certain landscapes. Both the art of Ed Gomez and Luis G. Hernandez place the meaning of Landscape to an active verb, that is, they highlight the natural environment as process, raising the questions, why, what, when, and who landscapes. In this exhibition, UN/belonging in the Land of Milk & Honey Gomez and Hernandez’s active artistic inquiries disrupt the fixity of belonging by manipulating the conventions of landscape representation.
Ed Gomez’s panoramic canvases explore the mythification of ancestral US Southwestern lands, and their appropriation by the Hollywood film industry with the purpose of normalizing Native extermination. Referencing surveillance technologies via the fiction of popular “alien” culture, Gomez’ hypernatural brushwork reclaims the supernatural space that these landscapes occupy in the popular imaginary. This naturalistic yet uncanny landscaping of the SW ultimately displaces the idea of belonging by way of uncanny encounters with the fictionalized Southwest.
Luis G. Hernandez landscapes the space of the border via detailed studies of discarded objects left along the divisory line between the U.S. and Mexico. This gesture de-centers the perspective from artist to spectator. The careful rendering of these objects embeds them with an infinite amount of signifiers. How, who, where, and why these garments were left behind is only but one of the many stories that could be told through them. The ambiguity of banal objects receiving an academic rigor reinforces the ambivalence of the space surrounding the border. A stark reminder that regardless of how they got there, they are part of an ever fluctuating and highly politicized space of UN/belonging
In UN/belonging, obstruction becomes a concept that unites both artists. Through his kaleidoscopic screens placed as filters from which to discern the gallery space, Gomez offers views by denying us entry. This first encounter with the space aims to disorient and remind the viewer—in a similar gesture as Hernandez’s placement of his “Welcome” neon sign—that the landscapes of the Southwest and its borderlands are contested territories. Fundamentally, both artists exploit the art of landscape through the volatility of its conventions—centering notions of UN/belonging to explore how we identify with others, ourselves, and the landscape itself and to mirror the infinite processes of distortion that landscape representations have always embodied.
UN/belonging in the Land of Milk & Honey is a special program of the MexiCali Biennial, a non-profit contemporary visual arts organization that focuses on the area encompassing California and Mexico as a region of aesthetic production. The organization is migratory in nature and showcases exhibitions on both sides of the California/Mexico border. Its 2022-2023 programs, collectively titled Land of Milk & Honey, focuses on broad topics associated with agriculture, land and foodways. UN/belonging not only serves as a platform for questioning land and place within the Californias, but also cements the identities of the founders of the biennial by re-centering their arts practice within their collaborative projects. For more information, please visit mexicalibiennial.org.
Emmanuel Ortega (PhD, Art History, University of New Mexico) is the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As a scholar and curator, Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on images of autos-de-fe, nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. Springing from his research interests, Ortega has curated in Mexico and the United States; his latest endeavor is the exhibition titled Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, at the New Mexico State University Art Museum. An essay titled, The Mexican Picturesque and the Sentimental Nation: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Landscape, was published by The Art Bulletin in the Summer of 2021. His book project, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge. He is a recurrent lecturer for Arquetopia Foundation for Development, the largest artist residency in México.
Ed Gomez received his BFA from Arizona State University in 1999 and his MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design in 2003. Gomez’s interdisciplinary art practice revolves around the questioning of exhibition practices, institutional framework, and historical models of artistic production. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and his practice includes abstract and representational painting, printmaking, graphic design, video, and three-dimensional work, as well as conceptual models of art-making. Gomez is also an accomplished curator and has organized and curated national, international, and traveling art exhibitions. In 2006, he co-founded the MexiCali Biennial, a bi-national art and music program addressing the region of the US-Mexico border, for which he is currently a director and co-president. This project serves not only as a curatorial project but also a satirical statement to the abundance of biennials occurring around the globe and the impact they have on the art community. Gomez is an Associate Professor in Studio Art at California State University, San Bernardino.
@edgomezdotcom
www.edgomez.com
Luis G. Hernandez is an artist, curator and educator who lives and works between Mexicali, B.C., Mexico and Imperial Valley, CA. Hernandez’ aesthetic production consists of sculptures, paintings, drawings, collages, and installations that respond in subtle ways to the space where they are exhibited. The artist makes provocative, and many times absurd associations between context, materials, and language, working through these elements as if they were sculptural spaces, and incorporating subject matter that points to art history, politics, and border issues.
At first sight, the artist’s work may look simple in execution and reception, but spending time with it reveals subtleties and intricacies in its production and reading. What can at one moment be seen as a political comment might at another moment shift to a poetic gesture- or be both simultaneously.
Solo exhibitions of the artist include Subtle Alterations, I21 espacio de proyectos, Mexicali, Mexico; Welcome, The Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM), Irvine, CA; Fault, Epicenter Projects, Joshua Tree, CA; A Temporary Thing, Artere-a, Guadalajara, Mexico; Untitled #53, Proxy Gallery, Los Angeles; Variantes, Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernardino, CA.
Hernandez is the current director of Steppling Gallery at San Diego State University, Imperial Valley. He earned his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2003
