kriziz by ektor garcia is the fifth of a series of six exhibitions organized by Chris Sharp for kurimanzutto. Taking place over the course of a year, the series will focus exclusively on emerging Mexican or Mexico-based artists. The intention of the project is to train a rigorous eye that sheds light upon some of the most active and challenging actors in the current art scene. kurimanzutto seeks to provide them with a unique platform within the local and international context, welcoming the development of a new generation of artists. Sharp’s selection will run as independent shows parallel to the gallery’s regular programming, maintaining their autonomy while productively resonating with each other.
Mexican-American artist ektor garcia's work synthesizes an interest in queer culture and arts and crafts traditions with strong roots in Mexico. Although he is ostensibly a sculptor, his works tend to be so elaborately installed and involuted that it is hard to say where things end or begin. Evocative of a homemade altar, collection of ritual or fetish objects, garcia’s environments feature artifacts fashioned from an amalgam of techniques including leather making, ceramics, sewing, welding, embroidery, and collecting. The objects themselves are known to range from handmade ceramic cups to leather cock rings, to dog muzzles, which are often combined with recycled and appropriated materials to engender hybrid forms resisting classification. When not appropriated, everything is crafted by the artist, who makes a point of learning each and every technique he uses, however imperfectly.
The work is liable to bring to mind the assemblages of Bruce Conner, the homoerotic leather culture of Robert Mapplethorpe, the personal mysticism of Paul Thek, and the mute or adumbrated violence of a homemade torture chamber. Moody, sensual, strangely elegant, and disturbing, his is an aesthetic of the truly minor– and this in every sense of the term, from the marginalized arts and crafts techniques he uses to the scale he works in to the cultural interstices among which the work circulates. It is at once weird, oddly familiar, and refreshingly unclassifiable.
— Chris Sharp
