PRESENTATION: ektor garcia-matéria prima

The American multidisciplinary artist ektor garcia approaches sculptural installation through wide-ranging experiments with craft techniques and materials. Throughout his practice, he develops a lexicon of crochet, weaving and fibre-work, including the use of ceramic, metal, leatherwork, found materials, and the principles of assemblage and social sculpture. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and his MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2016.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Henry Art Gallery Archive

Across his practice, ektor garcia challenges the hierarchies of gendered and racialized labor, combining a queer punk sensibility with the handcraft traditions of Mexico, his ancestral homeland. In textiles, ceramics, and metalwork, frequently in combination with found materials, garcia engages vernacular and craft practices historically cast in diminutive or marginalized roles, ascribing renewed value through intimate, repetitive processes. The resulting objects are hybrid in nature—both malleable and solid, dense and porous, sharp and tender—evoking the body and its labor as a source of pleasure and pain, rupture and healing. Pieces are often reconfigured; textiles are made and unmade. Undoing the knots is as important as reknotting to find new points of connection and possibility. For his solo exhibition “matéria prima”, garcia worked with faculty, staff, and students at the University of Washington’s Ceramic and Metal Arts Building to create a series of linked-chain sculptures made in ceramic, copper, and glass. Comprised of individual, interlocking links, these chains form a series of mutual and contingent relationships across their constitutive parts. Each link varies slightly and holds the memory of hands touching materials. The title of the exhibition, “matéria prima”, is a play on words that references garcia’s process: matéria prima (raw material) also includes the Spanish word prima (cousin). This double meaning reflects both the generative potential of garcia’s cumulative process and the relational affinities across materials and maker. Organized in variable permutations dependent on the space, garcia’s installations are an accumulation of objects, disrupting spatial hierarchies with sculptures sprawled across floors and dispersed throughout the supporting architecture. At the Henry, butterflies made of crocheted copper wire escape the confines of the gallery and inhabit interstitial spaces of the museum, directing visitors’ attention to less assuming locations within the building. A recurring motif across garcia’s work, the butterfly is a potent symbol of transformation and migration, and for garcia, also alludes to the derogatory, Spanish term for gay men used in Mexico mariposa (butterfly). In his hands, garcia reclaims this symbol. In a gesture emblematic of his larger practice, he recoups the socially devalued through acts of ritual care.

Photo: Installation view “ektor garcia: matéria prima”, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, 2022,. Photo: Jueqian Fang.

Info: Curator: Nina Bozicnik, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 15th Avenue NE + NE 41st Street, Seattle, WA, USA, Duration: 2/4-4/9/2022, Days & Hours: Thu 10:00-19:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://henryart.org/