Reflection & Renewal: Chican(x) Futurism An Evening at Gallery 2000 (Part 1)

"Reflection and Renewal: Chican(x) Futurism." Exhibit at Austin Community College, Highland Campus

“Using the tropes of speculative fiction (for example, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror), Chicanafuturist works excavate and retell histories of contact, colonialism, displacement, labor, migration, resistance, and social and cultural transformation in the Americas. Chicanafuturism defamiliarizes the familiar, thereby calling attention to that which tends to be taken for granted, such as tradition and the norm.”—Dr. Catherine S. Ramirez, Chicanafuturism 

This past October, I had the pleasure of experiencing the Reflection and Renewal: Chican(x) Futurism exhibit at ACC Highland Campus’ Gallery 2000. My first steps into the gallery were taken in awe–initially, with the use of open space and natural lighting, and secondly, at the rich multimodality of every surrounding piece of art. The exhibit is a stunning, carefully curated display of traditional and mixed-media artwork, all of which are created by Texas-based artists Angel Cabrales, Yareth Fernández, Nansi Guevara, and Luis Valderas.

In those first few moments when I stepped into the exhibit Dr. Catherine Ramirez’s words on Chicanafuturism resonated deeply. How does one go about envisioning Mexican-American identity, legacy, and presence in the current socio-political landscape? In speculating possible Chicanx futures, which parts of the past and present are remembered, and which are left behind?

The major theme of “Reflection and Renewal” are powerfully at work here. With Luis Valderas’ Teuquiyaoatl, from the Nahuatl word for a sacred portal allowing parallel universe travel, the viewer situates themselves at the center of spatial and temporal crossing.

Luis Valderas, Teuquiyaoatl (sacred portal) Installation: The Portal of Coatepec, 2022, mixed-media installation, 14 x 14 ft.

With Angel Cabrales’ Temacaliztli tlen atl Galvanizada, recalling the indigenous temazcal ceremony for self-purification, we experience a kind of protective symbiosis between nature and technology.

Angel Cabrales in collaboration with Bianca Cabrales, Temacaliztli tlen atl Galvanizada, (Offering of the Galvanized Rain), 2021, mixed media, 30 x 24 x 12 in. (featuring Prof. Aldama in background)

My personal favorite, another Cabrales piece, is Axhihuical: El Parallelo: The Parallel– a grand imagining of an alternate timeline in which colonization of the Western hemisphere, and the devastation of indigenous communities, never occurred. And grand it is: Axhihuical demands to be viewed at a distance in order to appreciate its temporal scope.

Angel Cabrales, Axhihuical: El Paralelo: The Parallel, 2021 26 x 132 x 2 in (66.04 x 335.28 x 5.08 cm) Laser-cut ceramic tile: Azulejo de cerámica cortado con láser

And yet, it’s also in the close reading of the individual tiles that Cabrales invokes reflection of what could have been– what if, for example, the European smallpox that devastated the Americas had been detected early and contained in 1519? Perhaps parallel dimension travellers in Valderas’ Teuquiyaoatl portal can attest, either in our present imaginations or in some techno-mythological future reality.

Chicanx past, present, and future is too rich and complex for me to condense into this post-exhibit reflection (Dr. Ramirez’s writings are a much fitter starting point for those looking to read further). But at the heart of it, this exhibit challenges me to reframe past, present, and future as more cyclical than linear.

Too often, I take for granted that time is animate, something that moves independently of us, has a life of its own. Perhaps that’s why there’s renewal to be found in futuristic art– we see what we take for granted, anew.

Reflection and Renewal: Chican(x) Futurism

An Evening at Gallery 2000 (Part 2)

A post-visit interview: I had the chance to speak with Olivia Spiers (Gallery Coordinator and Program Outreach), Norma Bickmore (Gallery Assistant), and Peter Bonfitto (Gallery Director) on bringing art to ACC students and the broader Austin community:

OS: Artwork also has– what I call a superpower– it really allows us to access our own experiences but also learn from other peoples’ experiences. All of these bring different thoughts and different lived experiences to an artwork which makes us view it differently, and I think art really has that ability to pull that out of us, more so than any other genre. But, of course, I’m biased. (laughs)

NB: This project was borne out of a relationship that was started with artist Luis Valderas, who is the artist of the portals in the back gallery. We were really interested in Chicanx Futurism because it’s new and starting to be a movement in San Antonio, and we wanted to capture that. Chicanx Futurism, there’s so many layers to it that we wanted to present it here… our mission is education, and part of education is action through educating people, so this is the perfect avenue for that. Luis introduced us to these artists, he worked with them through Project:MASA (Mechican Alliance of Space Artists) and they were all super generous with sharing their knowledge and perspectives of futurism and expanding on that idea.

PB: All our exhibitions are very geared towards student success but also to exploring the way that artwork conveys ideas in different ways. So there’s a content to it, that is, in this case Chicanx Futurism, discussing issues about living on the border, to living in two different places… but there’s also this other element where these artists are presenting their ideas in very sophisticated and unique ways. So that’s very exciting. For me, it’s also an intellectual exercise that is about critical thinking and developing that in students.

Check out Gallery 2000 and other upcoming exhibits at https://admc.austincc.edu/tag/chicanxfuturismintexas/.