Though ektor garcia is material agnostic, he is preoccupied with copper. He was born in Red Bluff, California, the child of migrant farmers. As a Mexican and an American, he feels at home in both countries. garcia1 is an avid practitioner of the art of crochet, in part to honor his mother and grandmother, and favors unexpected material combinations, challenging traditional techniques to become untraditional. He imbues the simplicity and familial familiarity of crochet with copper wire to bring disparate objects together. He sees the process of crochet as circular—spiraling out from its starting point, then connecting back to itself to create its own iterative structure. As an artist, he is drawn to cross-cultural references and the tenacity of migratory creatures.
garcia first studied art intensively in 2010 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, where he focused mainly on textiles. He next pursued an MFA at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with metals, wood, and ceramics. Becoming intimate with each of these materials in concert encouraged him to explore and experiment across techniques and materials. Ultimately, this concentrated study inspired garcia to disregard arbitrary material boundaries and cultivate an expansive relationship with both tooling and techniques...
Rebekah Frank
