Chicanx Artists rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales Reflect on Their Relationships to Mexico
What does it mean to be in diaspora when one’s ancestral land is so close it can be in spitting distance? And what does it mean to return to that land? In a way, that is the premise of a two-person exhibition at Commonwealth and Council gallery’s location in Mexico City (away from its home base in Los Angeles). For a show titled “WACHA: viajes transtemporales” (on view through March 30), rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales, both raised in LA and now based there, consider their respective relationships to Mexico for a collaboration, their second in the past six months. (With Mario Ayala, they mounted a joint exhibition at SFMOMA that looked at their relationship to cruising, both in low riders and of people.)
Memory plays a key role. The exhibition opens with a two-panel painting on adobe by esparza titled Colosio en lomas taurinas, despues del guardado (2024). The dense composition depicts Mexican politician Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta during a 1994 presidential campaign rally in the Tijuana neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas. A joyous crowd looks at an empty silhouette suggesting the presence of Colosio, who was assassinated that day and whose death was deeply felt on both sides of the border. Is the scene in the painting the moment right before joy turns into terror? esparza leaves it vague. All that remains is the ghostly specter of Colosio’s silhouette.