ektor garcia: rehacer

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Mexico City based artist ektor garcia. Across a multidisciplinary practice, garcia (b. 1985, Red Bluff CA) challenges the hierarchies of gendered and racialized labor, combining a queer punk sensibility with the handcraft traditions of Mexico, his ancestral homeland.

Titled rehacer - to redo, remake, rework – garcia’s solo debut at the gallery eschews the concept of finality. Reconfiguring, undoing to start anew, to find new points of connection and possibility, are integral tenets of garcia’s practice. Undoing the knot is as important as reknotting. Engaging vernacular and craft practices historically cast in diminutive or marginalized roles, garcia ascribes renewed value through intimate, ritual processes. The resulting objects are hybrid in nature - both malleable and solid, dense and porous, sharp and supple - evoking the body and its labor as a source of pleasure and pain, rupture and healing.

In a layered presentation installed on the floor, from the ceiling and on the wall, garcia’s exquisite mark of hand is evident across media. Individual works and installations make use of deeply varied textures, techniques, and materials side-by-side, such as lace, weaving, and crochet, as well as stoneware and metalwork. Utilizing craftwork connected to his own biography and cultural inheritance, garcia integrates ceramic and glass chain links shaped to mimic bone, with copper hanging wreaths inspired by Victorian hair art as memorial and mourning, with a metal geometric sculptural male torso wrapped in copper wire, with a collection of shells sourced from various travels crocheted together, with a series of intricate woven screens of copper and leather.

garcia’s sculptures hover in time, snapshots of a moment, floating somewhere between ancient craft techniques, family heirlooms, and future exhumed artifacts. There is an embedded past and future in each object. Both self-referential and broad, garcia captures the ephemeral joy and sorrow of temporal existence.