Millas y Kilómetros at the National Museum of Mexican Art

Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 287 : Aug 26–Sep 1, 2010 

As he drives a delivery truck around Chiapas in Go Colorada (2009), Amin “Katun” Gutierrez carries Chicago with him—literally, in the form of a three-foot-high steel replica of the skyline. The sharp-edged sculpture’s presence suggests both dislocation and its flip side: the occupation of two places at once through the power of memory.

Memory, migration and frustration dominate this exhibition co-organized by the Centro Cultural Jaime Sabines in Chiapas, Mexico. “Millas y Kilómetros” brings together artists from Chicago and Chiapas, who participated in an exchange. While many pieces visualizing ideas about home and place stand out, the show needs more context relating to the artists’ experiences.

Like Go Colorada, SAIC M.F.A. student Caleb Duarte’s video Casa Voladoras employs the particularly poignant metaphor of carrying place. Here, that place is a sense of home shared by members of migrant communities. Duarte records about a dozen men as they struggle to support a flimsy replica of a house atop 50-foot poles, which sway in the wind. The artist enhances the video’s unsteadiness by building a ramshackle wooden structure around it in the museum.

Duarte’s classmate Eric J. Garcia also references Chiapas only indirectly, but he confronts Mexico’s history of conquest, exploitation and genocide through Altered States (pictured, 2009–10), a baroque altar that physically dominates the show. Garcia draws capitalists and conquistadors as grinning fat cats in a blood-soaked narrative. His cartoonish style reflects a command of symbolism and irony that makes the familiar story all the more devastating.

- CW