Mess-tizo
A video installation deconstructing the post-colonial shadow realm. Using the index of Missions, spanish archtierual styles connects two places of commerce utilizing affects of assimilation to erase and transform person, place, and consiousness. One room is outfitted as a 17th century mission courtyard, complete with plaster arches, a fountain, smiling/frowning resin cactus, mimicking jack-o-lanterns; a resin cast of Templo Mayor, hidden under layers of ‘Masa’ (baking soda, corn starch, citric acid, sage essential oil, and coconut oil) shaped into the silhouette of a Mission, w/ water pipettes staged so viewers can place water droplets onto the piece, and slowly dissolves. Lastly, a audio piece in two Erewhon bags, reciting street names and cities in Los Angeles County, in both English and spanish accents—represents collapsed plural cultures dissolving and mutating onto itself.
INside the chapel room, the ‘Nowhere’ video plays. the title is an anagram for Erewhon, and also the name of a gregg arak film. The title suggests this notion of caricature, as well as dark connotionas associated to colonialism— as if a never-ending cycle of erasure, of alienation.
The plot, drenched in surrealism, features a ‘mestizo’ getting ready for a days work, at the mission general store. Where a 17th century karen comes to collect her ingredients, she’s cooking up dinner for the PAdres. through dream logic, and fable story-telling, a magical transformation occurs, as the titular character and colonial antagonist portray racialized power dynamics, situated in 17th century mission lore and 21st century art institutions.
IN the final room, a grey shack structure, reminiscent of the mall brand ‘HOllister’, built out of pvc pipe, cardboard, and house paint, houses the ‘Blister’ video. Continuing the mechanism of parody and utilizing southern california, millennial tropes—emo, prep, beach goth, millennial grey— labor, as a racialized verb, and assimilation is dissected and gone through the caricature filter as another iteration of customer service parody, where the contemporary market place, in reference to ‘Hollister’, employs similar tactics of cultural indoctrination, as seen through the perspective of ‘white passing’, or ‘white wash’ within ethnic, immigrant perspectives.
