Luis De Jesus Los Angeles  |  Art Basel Miami Beach: Nova  |  Booth: N19

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents a dynamic installation for Art Basel Miami Beach’s Nova sector with works by Edra Soto, Ken Gonzales-Day and Hector Dionicio Mendoza. All three Latinx artists use landscape as a lens through which to explore themes of migration, issues of colonialism and the erasure of history, expressed through sculpture, photography, and mixed media.

Edra Soto’s GRAFT is an ongoing series of architectural interventions consisting of representations of rejas (wrought iron fences and screens) and quiebrasoles (concrete breeze blocks), the decorative elements present in mid-twentieth century Puerto Rican vernacular architecture. The work uses textural elements, colors, and designs that pay homage to the facades of homes in Puerto Rico. By incorporating viewfinders that reveal images of the local landscape, domestic still-lifes, and personal ephemera, Soto adds an element of photographic performativity that engages audiences. Overarchingly, these sculptures make visible the role that African diasporic traditions have played and continue to play in Puerto Rican architecture. Yet perhaps equally important is Soto’s personal exploration of home, where the elements of GRAFT serve as a container for her own relationship to home.

The images in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings series (2002-ongoing) are derived from appropriated lynching postcards and archival materials in which Gonzales-Day has removed the lynch victim and the ropes. This conceptual gesture is intended to direct the viewers’ attention not upon the lifeless body of the victim, but upon the mechanisms of lynching themselves: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer, and to even consider the impact of flash photography upon this dismal past. The series strives to make the invisible visible and seeks to expose racially motivated lynching and vigilantism was a more widespread practice in the American West than was believed. The absences or empty spaces in the photographs become emblematic of the forgotten history made more palpable considering the recent events surrounding the resurgence of the noose as means of intimidation and instilling fear everywhere from the workplace to the schoolyard.

The sculptural works by Hector Dionicio Mendoza are informed and guided by his personal experiences of the US/Mexico border region, an area in constant flux. Themes of migration and the environment as well as the geographies of place, memory, identity, and the visualization of immigrant stories are consistent throughout his work. Mendoza grew up with a great appreciation for the importance of faith, ritual, and alternative healing traditions as practiced by his grandfather, a fifth-generation curandero (shaman) of Afro-Caribeño lineage. In Mexico as well as Central and South America, the curandera/o plays an important role to many people embarking on the long and challenging journey to El Norte (The North/United States), providing blessings and protection before they depart in search of a better way of life. This ancestral framework forms the foundation for Mendoza's ambitious and expansive multimedia practice, with its surprising explorations and unconventional use of natural, organic, synthetic, and recycled materials one would encounter on a migration such as cardboard, soil and tree branches, bread, plastic, and textiles.

Media Contact: Brianna Bakke, Director | mobile: 1.323.448.0147 | email: gallery@luisdejesus.com

LOCATION:
Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive
Miami Beach, FL 33139

DATES & TIMES 
Vip And Press Preview- 
By invitation: Wednesday, December 6th, from 9:30am to 7pm, and Thursday, December 7th, from 11am to 7pm

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC:
Friday, December 8, 2023, 11am to 6pm
Saturday, December 9, 2023, 11am to 6pm
Sunday, December 10, 2023, 11am to 6pm