Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present Hector Dionicio Mendoza: Buscando Futuro / Searching for a Future, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view in Gallery 1 from January 13 through February 17, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 13 from 4 to 7 p.m. Hector Dionicio Mendoza’s work materializes oral histories, ancient wisdom, familial parables, and personal and communal experiences to engage the many myths and realities of migration. Combining an array of sculptural forms and materials—including assemblage, cast, and hand-sculpted techniques, along with found, salvaged and industrial materials, his works are informed and guided by his own personal experiences and the realities and politics of the U.S./Mexico border. Fluctuating between abstraction and figuration, it ignites our consciousness with narratives that embrace magical realism and Latinx/e futurism while exploring themes of migration and the environment, spirituality, as well as the geographies of place, memory, identity, and the visualization of immigrant stories that expand upon a new latinidad. As a storytelling device, Mendoza's consideration of materials is not only linked to the formation of his sculptures but is also an embodiment of their story and journey, and a prescription for healing. Inspired by ethnobotany and memories of his grandfather, a fifth-generation curandero, or shaman-healer, Mendoza's materials embody themes and narratives expressed in the works, utilizing materials associated with place—such as earth, local flora and eucalyptus trees; materials related to labor—such as corrugated cardboard, cinderblocks, and plywood; in addition to quotidian found objects—including plastic bottles and recycled clothing along with the artist's own concoction of ethnic bread (produced from his study of global flatbreads made for travel, from the tortilla to pita, naan, matzo, and other yeast-less types). Mendoza manages a poetic flux between the often ignored familiar and the awe-inspiring mythical with his ability to evoke weight, emotion, struggle, and hope to elicit wonder and empathy. In "Morir o Volar, Lalo (Die or Fly, Lalo)", Mendoza weighs the figure down with cinderblocks in contrapposto, lifted by open arms that shift to a weightless spread of painted feathers and carved corrugated cardboard with the figure's head and expression, fearless, steady and focused forward. Despite the weight of the cement blocks, Mendoza captures movement and an arc of transitions, using familiar materials to translate Lalo's struggle to us, inciting empathy and a belief in the heroic figure's determination and resilience. The work is inspired by Lalo, Mendoza's childhood friend and first crush, who moved from their small town in the southern state of Michoacan to San Francisco to be free from the harassment he endured for being queer. Lalo found freedom to be himself in San Francisco yet still gave back to his hometown by sending money to open a tiendita, a little store. "En Mis Sueños, Yo Vuelo (When I Dream I Fly)", is Mendoza's ode to the "Dreamers," the generation of the DREAM (Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, introduced in 2001 and yet to be ratified, which would provide a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children. A hoodie figure balancing on a skateboard appears to recline back in a pietà-like stance, with no Virgin to hold him, only feathers giving hope to break the fall. The dreamer's lower body has a patina of ethnic bread, and the upper body dons an earth-encrusted sweatshirt; inside the hoodie, a mirrored kaleidoscope with a peacock feather represents infinite outcomes and a continual search, in limbo. The exhibition also features bas relief wall sculptures, with stencil-patterned plywood Mendoza calls "Sombras", or shadows, which often correlate to free-standing three-dimensional sculptures. Pinche Burro, asno (Beast of Burden, jackass), a silhouette of a burro, donkey, camouflaged by stenciled botanicals, transmutes to human limbs, feet and hands, walking and carrying an abstracted load, a heavy burden made of lumps and heaps of ethnic bread, eucalyptus bark, glass, and earth. Mendoza commemorates day laborers who are often treated as disposable, reflecting on attitudes towards labor, inhumane working conditions, class struggles, and social issues that exist on both sides of the border. The camouflage botanicals depicted here is a recurring motif in the series of sombras and symbolizes landscape, healing, and protection. Buscando Futuro (Searching for a Future) brings a trove a stories and experiences together to address the many uncertainties and complexities of migration, including social constructs, classism, and geopolitics that can hinder the simple right to hope. Mendoza’s materialization of these narratives not only brings a means for representation, but also a course for imagining alternative futures, and critical discourse for issues faced within communities including intersectional feminisms, labor, human rights, and LGBTQIA+ rights. Mendoza’s use of familiar and recycled materials inspires possibilities of transforming the forgotten, pride in origins, and endurance for the search. Hector Dionicio Mendoza (b.1969, Uruapan, Michoacan, MX) lives in Salinas, CA, and holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT and a BFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. Mendoza is an artist, curator, and educator based in the agricultural community of the Salinas Valley in California. He is the recipient of the 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant, and his work was a highlight in the California Biennial 2022 at the Orange County Museum of Art. Other awards include the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship (2004), Kunst Now (2005) in Berlin, and Eco-Conciente (2007) in Mexico City. He has participated in artist-in-residence programs and exhibitions in Europe, including a six-month residency at KunstFutur in Switzerland (2000), The Bossard Project in Berlin (2001), Casa Santos in Barcelona (2002), and The Putney Arts Center in London (2003). Mendoza was awarded the prestigious Lucas Artist Residency (2015) at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA. In 2021, working together with the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Department of Latinx Studies, Mendoza helped to create and fund the inaugural Mariposa Prize, named after his work “Mariposa/Butterfly,” which entered the museum’s collection the same year. He has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Mexico, and is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Installation in the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University Monterey Bay. Mendoza’s work resides in prominent collections, including Mt. Holyoke Museum of Art, MA; The Bunker/Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Palm Beach, FL; The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; and OZ Art NWA, Bentonville, AR, among others. ____ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to present Griselda Rosas: Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before), on view in Gallery 2 and 3 from January 13 through February 17, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 13 from 4 to 7 p.m. Informed by her fluid experiences with the Mexico and US border and life between Tijuana and San Diego, Griselda Rosas deconstructs the ambiguities of identity and place, learned, and generationally passed subjugation, and the legacies of colonization and conflict. She often focuses on the pre-colonial and post-colonial war scenes and the introduction of Catholicism to Indigenous customs in the Americas as part of the Spanish colonial agenda. Rosas examines these histories alongside her roles as an educator and single mother, frequently collaborating with her young son to produce works that pulsate with the energy of an uninhibited child’s eye and hand. In Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before), mixed media collages comprised of fabrics, cyanotypes, acrylic, watercolor, natural pigments and vivid embroidery are exhibited alongside sculptures of ornamental slingshots—objects loaded with dualities, such a child's toy, and a weapon used today and by the ancient Aztecs. The collages tell stories of colonization and resistance, with horses and wild animals leaping in the scenes against figures in colorful war regalia. Rosas presents a nimble transition of handiwork, care, and conflict between sculptures representing play and warfare and the details of mending and embroidery work—a ritual and practice passed down through generations, from her mother, grandmother, and aunts, and a celebrated indigenous art adorning garments and textiles in Mexican homes. Taking inspiration from the fairytales and stories that she read to her young son, in addition to children’s make-believe games and toys, Rosas reimagines brilliantly hued scenes appropriated from historical Mexican, European, and Indian documents, fables and myths, including El Lienzo de Tlaxcala (The Codex of Tlaxcala), a colonial-era pictorial codex produced in the second half of the sixteenth century, the illustrated fables of La Jean de La Fontaine dating back to the European Middle Ages, and The Panchatantra, an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables written in Sanskrit verse and prose. These stories deploy metaphors of anthropomorphized animals with human virtues—not unlike those found on Aztec battle regalia. Rosas' works hover between the recognizable and the unfamiliar, like objects unearthed in an archaeological dig and suspended in the amorphous clouds of a dream or supernatural revelation. Battle and hunting scenes are juxtaposed with modern syncretic festivities in Oaxaca and cyanotypes depicting ancient breast-feeding icons and 17th-century images of the Virgin Mother and Child. Indigenous warriors wear feathered body suits, battle standards on their backs, and hold circular shields; European warriors are dressed in armor or doublets and have oval shields. Old World horses gallop next to New World turkeys. Rosas' material processes are highly considered, too. The rubber used for her slingshot sculptures is sourced from indigenous communities in Southern Mexico, a similar location to where the Aztecs sourced their rubber; her cyanotypes and watercolors embody a natural and elemental collaboration with light and water. Rosas also incorporates materials that are imbued with her personal memories; for example, the incorporation of faux ostrich skin comes from seeing alligator-booted narcos, drug traffickers in Tijuana—a regalia for another type of war. And she uses the same pimpled-grained fabric to conjure the spread of smallpox introduced by the Spanish conquistadores, which dealt a devastating blow to the Aztecs. Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before), prompts a questioning of cycles. Rosas' conflation of past and present blurs boundaries and resists binaries to rethink origins, influences, and patterns. Her animated, vibrant drawings and sculptures craft new ways of considering the present by understanding how colonialist images, propaganda and actions are entrenched within our histories. Griselda Rosas (born in Tijuana, Mexico) received her BFA in painting and printmaking in 2006 from San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, and an MFA in sculpture in 2013. Since 2013 she has taught drawing, painting, and embroidery as an adjunct professor at San Diego State University. Recent solo exhibitions include Yo te cuido at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) (2023); Forged Dialect, Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA (2022); and Regata Abscisa, Oceanside Museum of Art, San Diego, CA (2020). Notable group exhibitions include Stories from My Childhood, Northern Illinois University Art Museum, DeKalb, IL (2022); Cannon Gallery Ninth Invitational Exhibition, Carlsbad, CA (2022); First International Festival of Manuports, Kohta, Helsinki, Finland (2021); and San Diego Art Prize Exhibit, Bread & Salt, San Diego, CA (2020); among others.