Harold Mendez: and, perhaps, here, between

A first-generation American of Colombian and Mexican descent, Harold Mendez (b.
1977, Chicago) produces artworks that engage the long arc of hemispheric history in
the Americas, from the ancestral cosmologies of the continents’ original inhabitants to
the diasporic knowledges that came with forced and unforced migrations from Europe,
Africa, and elsewhere, and which form such an important part of New World cultures.
Working in photography, sculpture, sound, and installation, Mendez’s objects explore
cultural memory, ritual, and transnational experiences. The porous borders between
fiction and truth, visibility and absence, material bluntness and ethereal, poetic moods
run through his work, making a case for the articulation of complex narratives as the
necessary outcome of the culturally rich and deeply stratified spaces of the Americas.