HUGO CROSTHWAITE

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce HUGO CROSTHWAITE: CARAVAN, an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures, and videos, on view in Gallery 2 and Gallery 3 from January 14 through March 4, 2023. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 21, from 4 to 7 pm. 

Drawing from his own experiences as a citizen living on the U.S./Mexico-border, Hugo Crosthwaite has spent the past twenty years documenting the endless ebb and flow of humanity between Tijuana and San Diego. Each day, thousands of migrants and refugees trek across this great divide. With his sketchbook and camera in hand, Crosthwaite captures their portraits and personal stories while they stand in line or sit on a bus or park bench waiting to cross. 

The works in Caravan speak to the harsh reality faced by migrants as they make the treacherous journey to the border in search of the American Dream. This is a reality that few of us have experienced personally, yet stories of the vulnerability, disenfranchisement, and violence faced at the southern border continue to make bold headlines every week while year after year political stump speeches stoke fear and prejudice. 

As an installation, Caravan is comprised of a series of wooden pedestals, or towers, each holding five individually hand-crafted and hand-painted ceramic figurines resembling ancient Mayan idols onto which Crosthwaite has drawn migrants’ faces. It is installed in a meandering line that follows the contours of the border wall between San Diego-Tijuana, and is accompanied by a five-minute stop-motion drawing animation video. The video references the politicization of the term “caravan” as a way of dehumanizing these aliens. Crosthwaite’s haunting ceramic figurines re-center the migratory routes and the flesh of asylum-seekers in physicality and empathy.

In a new series of large-scale paintings on canvas titled Manifest Destiny the artist re-introduces the use of color in his work, last employed some twenty years ago. In these works, Crosthwaite takes inspiration from American Progress, the 1872 painting by John Gast that serves as an allegory for Manifest Destiny and American westward expansion. In three of the paintings a central female figure—Columbia, Lady Liberty, and the Virgin of Guadalupe—personifying the hopes and dreams of a future, lead migrants facing great adversity across the desert wilderness to an uncertain destiny.

A second series of smaller paintings, titled Borderlands, and rendered more typically in black and white with acrylic, ink and graphite on panel capture the eclectic architectural aesthetic of Tijuana in detail, contrasting its intimacy and chaos with idealized aspects of the migrants’ desired life beyond the border. These paintings, aspects of which are featured in the video, explore notions of the border and migration through a combination of figurative representation, abstraction, surrealism, and pop elements.