Enrique Chagoya on...

Enrique Chagoya on…

During the opening for his current exhibition ‘Borderless’ at the gallery, Enrique Chagoya joined curator Jennifer Farrell to talk about his work. The wide-ranging and insightful conversation that ensued touched on everything from his formative childhood experiences to his own genetic makeup and impressed us all with his skill as a storyteller. In case you missed it, what follows are excerpts from that conversation.

... identity: I have students from different backgrounds, some of them are from South Africa, one of them told me, I didn't feel like I was Black until I came to this country. And I said, I felt the same as being Mexican, I didn’t feel Mexican until I came to this country. So that began to put in my mind all these issues of borders that people have – you know, people who cry because somebody might marry somebody from another cultural background, that's a border… The national borders and the geographic borders are perhaps the most obvious but they're not necessarily the most intense or the strongest ones. So immigration began to be, for me, part of the history of colonialism; how basically in the history of the world humans have to migrate from one place to another, fighting with other humans in other places and one culture colonizes another culture and eventually they commingle, they become one and maybe that's the history human kind.

... humor: So all through these difficult times I try to find a little bit of humor, that’s coming from sincerity from me. I'm not trying to make - to push something to make it funny, never. I just put the things that make me laugh, smile. I try to abolish stereotypes because they dehumanize people.... I use humor to project that there is a human being behind every state of mind, no matter what the state of mind is.

... forgeries: My dad taught me how to draw and paint when I was seven years old, he used to paint at home but he never had a show, he never made a living as an artist, but he taught me how to draw mostly because I was bugging him all the time, asking him to draw things for me, man, I want a submarine, an airplane… he’d tell me, do it yourself. He ended up getting a job at the central bank, the bank that prints the money in Mexico, the mint, you know, and the job of my dad was to catch forgers. And his office was a museum of forgeries; he’d take me to work when I was ten years old, I saw not only Mexican pesos and the Mexican plate for the Mexican pesos, but dollar bills and the plate for the dollar bills. There were French, there were Cuban, there were the pesos or equivalent from Columbia and Venezuela bolivars, anyway, I loved it. As a kid I was just, “How did they do it?” but my dad - he was part of a group of investigators, they caught quite a few forgers. And my dad, because he was an artist, he befriended them, he brought art supplies to the prison and they told him their stories and their stories were fascinating. One did a portrait of my dad and he asked him, “why did you do what you did? You went to the best art schools in France, you come from a wealthy family, you could make a career as an artist, why did you have to fall into forgeries?” and the artist says, the forger, “well I did it for the thrills!” Well, my very first idea in art school was that I wanted to do a forgery too, for the thrills, but I didn’t want to get caught. I didn’t want to be in jail. So I changed it a little bit.

... cannibalism: Cannibalism is a stigma that has been used against Native Americans, especially in places like Brazil or Mexico… it's no different than a painting like Charles Wimar’s painting The Abduction of Daniel Boone’s Daughter by Indians. That’s quote-unquote the title. In his painting it is a young woman crying and he portrayed very cruel looking, indigenous characters. So I decided to take that painting, appropriate that painting with the indigenous characters, with Donald Duck and the border patrol in the canoe, the original border patrol... It's a stereotype: of human sacrifice, cannibalism, like engravings by Theodore De Bry, a [16th-century] Belgian artist who showed cannibal women cannibalizing somebody and their head is sitting on a plate… all of these things are stereotypes, cannibalism is a stereotype. I tried to reverse that by cannibalizing the stereotypes, putting them back. What would happen if the Native Americans – or the Indigenous cultures anywhere in the world – had conquered Europe? And let’s see if they put pyramids in Europe, built with the stones from the Cathedral, rather than the other way around. I thought, it would be basically just as bad; it’s not necessarily any better, it’s just as bad, of course. So my work in a way, is a form in which people have acted through history. I think the Europeans cannibalized the cultures that they conquered, And vice versa, there was still a mix of influence at some point… It’s just that history of cannibalism of cultures; there is a blend of cultures, I call it cannibalizing, but it is also a blend. So anyway, I think the history of humankind, I’m trying to put a mirror on ourselves; I’m not trying to point fingers at anybody, I try not to be moralizing in my work at all. If anything, I get in trouble for it.

... immigration: My last codex is called Wild Spirits That Shine Obstinately Beyond Walls, it has a lot of characters that represent the history of humanity, from ancient migrations to contemporary migrations. We see that the original undocumented immigrants that came to this country, the Spaniards and the pilgrims and the French and all the other groups, the Dutch, they had no passports. So this country is based not just on immigration but on undocumented immigration. So, that's where things get very complex because we enrich ourselves with immigration, but people get threatened by immigration at the same time. I don't know how to describe it, but it's part of ourselves, the yin and the yang, the best and the worst… that's the biggest issue.