Galleries, Miami
Pepe Mar
You Should Have Never Crossed the Rio Grande
David CastilloDavid Castillo presents You Should Have Never Crossed the Rio Grande, a solo exhibition of fabric paintings and assemblages by Pepe Mar. The artist’s emigration in the 1990s from Mexico to the United States serves as a stage through which he explores the development of his own work and of the country in which he now resides. Tracing the aesthetic and thematic genealogies of his practice along the two decades that have since followed, Mar considers how migratory experiences have shaped the nation and, by extension, how they have come to influence his practice in the context of a city like Miami—where he lives and works and where visual culture is inflected by a diversity of diasporas. Across the various pieces on view, Mar interlaces material references to the histories of art and museological practice; found objects and artifacts gathered from secondhand shops with ties to South Florida’s queer enclaves; and personal, pop-cultural obsessions; elements that together form highly layered frameworks of aesthetic, symbolic, and cultural meaning that point towards the overarching—yet unanswerable—question that the artist poses with this exhibition: “Would my life and practice have developed differently had I stayed in Mexico?”