MEXTASY: The Website

Mextasy is Invading South Texas, McAllen, Weslaco, and Laredo, Fall 2010!!! More info to come...

Here's the tentative schedule of events surrounding this crazy South Texas invasion:

Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2010: South Texas College Mid-Valley campus (Weslaco), mid-afternoon talk and booksigning at MVC library (map) Details TBA
Thursday, Sept. 30, 2010: South Texas College, Pecan Campus, a mid-afternoon gallery talk and booksigning; gallery opening from 6-8 pm. (map) Details TBA

Ceci n'est pas un Galeria: Rene Magritte in Mexico City!

Mexican Superheroes, Working Immigrants, XicanOSMOSIS, and Dulce Pinzón

original posting: 3/5/08

It may be the times (and a facebook query from a regular reader), but I think the present anti-immigrant zeitgeist demands that we rethink the way we see these mostly brave, valiant, documented and undocumented sojourners--no one makes us do that better than Dulce Pinzón.

Xicanosmosis is one of the key concepts that emerges in the closing sections of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in American. A mouthful of a word, XicanOSMOSIS is a name loaded with salacious, reproductive overtones; it describes a peculiar process or phenomena where the high-brow and low-brow miasmal excesses of U.S. pop culture and the equally sordid and delicious emanations of Mexican mass arts fuse, co-mingle, spoon, and "splorf" into and onto each other in a veritable orgy of creative synergy and aesthetic synesthasia. You can see xicanosmotic climaxes and much, much, much more at work in the brilliant art of Dulce Pinzón, especially her Superheroes project.


Pinzon's fabulous gallery of ocular delights imagines an urban metropolitan setting where working Mexican immigrants are re-imagined at their labors clothed in the garb of DC and Marvel comics finest--Spiderman, the Flash, the Thing, Batman, and more. The go-to target of fascist racist pundits, the working poor, the swarthy immigrant, is re-visioned as the epitome of American fantasy, the Superhero.


Gracias, gracias to the BorderLore newsletter, a project out of the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona! More info? Hit this.

Camille Rose García: Probing Disney's Unconscious With a Gifted Xicanosmotic Eye

Tragic Kingdom, "The Saddest Place on Earth"--with Camille Rose Garcia's work, we swim the innocence of Walt's imagination as if philtered through Franz Kafka's id. This SoCal Xicana's imagination continues to unfold in beautiful and dark, unpredictable ways. What I love about her art and what I suspect will keep her canvases rocketing up the hierarchy of the art world's ladder is the way she fuses the clever apt eye of high art--her themes of damned innocence and what might be thought of as a blighted existentia will always appeal to the ivory tower of artdom's keeprs--with the lurid, yellow journalistic, cadence of outsider art. Now that Will Elder has entered the marble orchard, she may well be my fave weaver of painted hieroglyphia.

Here's a damned fine interview with her, pictured below courtesy of this blog chronicling a Marion Peck gallery opening.