N.A.S.A.L. presents Swallowing the Sun, a solo exhibition by Mexican artist Enrique Garcia.
Garcia’s photo-based practice explores the processes that drive erasure, decay, and replication of form. Touching on history, colonialism, and the consequences of technology, his work centers on the paradoxical relationship between creation and destruction. His photo compositions act as networks of symbols using placement and layered juxtaposition to imbue found materials with new meanings. The artwork’s varied references ranging from ancient ruins, celestial objects, to modern technological advancements elicit the sublime while provoking reflection on the meaning of human progress.
Garcia studied Sculpture at Pratt Institute. His work has been shown at N.A.S.A.L. (MX), SculptureCenter (NY), and Aro (MX). He lives and works between New York and Mexico City.
" (...) Enrique Garcia’s Swallowing the Sun presents six works that, at first, feel decidedly analog: photos sourced from library collections in New York and Mexico as well as from a variety of magazines are crisply cut and offset by steel, aluminum, wood, and corrugated plastic. They depict highways, clocks, railway editorials, Mesoamerican artifacts, microprocessors, solar corona. Garcia’s image-objects are simultaneously futurist and decelerating. He deploys appropriated photos of both the hyper-contemporary sublime (Emerati skyscrapers cresting clouds) and the originary sublime (the splayed-out horizon of the conquerable frontier, as composited to align in Límite Poniente), but texturized, morphed, and united by layers of corrugated plastic. (...) "
Exhibition text by Drew Zeiba
