MODERNISISIMO
La Plaza is proud to present its inaugural exhibition, Modernisisimo, a selection of new works by Mexican-American artist Alan Luna. Modernisisimo features selections from Metametates and Huipiles Colorados, two bodies of work from Luna’s evolving practice. Together, they offer a multifaceted exploration of American Modernism’s relationship to Mexican culture that challenges dominant narratives of North American art. His work merges his academic background in art history with his upbringing in the postmodern drift of Tijuana’s urban landscape and later youth in the cultural sterility of suburban San Diego.
Rendered through 3D modeling software, Metametates are still-life images that evoke the style of early 20th-century American photographers whose work was transformed by their Mexican sojourns. To an American public, their work presented a primitive Mexico that was perceived as an alternative to the alienation of industrial society, its otherness confirmed by the photographic eye even as their sleek aesthetics reassured Americans of their own progressive modernity. In Mexico, the government used their photos to help construct a new Mexican identity that appropriated the folkways of rural and Indigenous peoples, but did little to economically or politically uplift them. This nation-building project was instrumental in codifying contemporary Mexican notions of gender, sex, faith, labor, and race.
Luna’s prints depict metates, an ancient tool used in Mexican food preparation that has been commodified into a signifier of tradition and folk culture. The metate was once integral to the daily labor of working Mexican women who would spend hours each day grinding corn by hand for tortillas. Here, it is deactivated as a productive tool and recontextualized as a sensual agent of erotic play that transgresses the conservative sexual norms of the United States and Mexico. Challenging its traditional functionality, Luna suggests the metate as a dynamic subject for queer, non-productive pleasure freed from the limiting constraints of gendered representation.
Luna’s use of digital technology allows for highly realistic, almost tangible virtual imagery. However, the possibility of photorealism is undermined by Luna’s inclusion of digital artifacts that subtly point to the constructed nature of the image. Inspired by the materiality of early photographic processes, Luna prints his images on traditional art paper in order to create objects that blur the line between digital and physical media. Metametates forms a coded critique of Modernist photography by evoking its aesthetics and physicality, while subverting the documentary quality of the photographic image and the sentimental commodification of Mexican material culture.
The moment of contact between the exiled European avant-grade and Mexican art marks the inception of American abstract painting, a development that eventually led to Frank Stella’s Black Paintings. Though Stella’s work marked a significant breakthrough in American art, it laid the seeds for the self-termination of Modernism as a viable cultural endeavor. In Huipiles Colorados, Luna reinterprets the Black Paintings by copying them in vibrant red onto raw unstretched canvas that is then weathered, cut and stitched into traditional garments known as huipiles, loose tunics woven and traditionally worn by Indigenous women
throughout Mexico and Central America. The deconstructed paintings stand on wooden structures that endow them with human presence, and grouped together suggest a gathering of people. Through this conceptual intervention, Luna loops the development of American Modernism back into itself and forms a
poignant critique of its extractive relationship with the non-Western world. Stella’s paintings become decorative patterns, the authority of his singular voice nullified and redistributed into a collective body.
Luna’s practice explores the intersections of art history, neo-colonialism, and queer experience, proposing new forms of representation that decenter the primacy of the human body. His work is an irreverent celebration of the pleasures and complexity of cultural hybridity, insisting on the power and enduring
influence of Mexican culture on the development of American Modernism.
Bio
Born in San Diego and raised on both sides of the border, Alan Luna is an artist and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles.
Alan received his BA in Studio Art and Art History/Criticism from UC San Diego. His work has been featured at the former San Diego Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Southwestern College Art Gallery, and the Mandeville Art Gallery.