André Filipek & Cole Lu. While Removing the Garbage or Paying the Cleaner

About

In the exhibition, the two artists look to mechanisms of resilience as means to both segment and interpret the intricacies of displacement. Filipek questions the efficacy of representation and economic propaganda in a Mexican culture whose history is laden with capital-driven white supremacy. His sculptures take the form of Rotoplas water storage containers. Often found on the rooftops of Mexican residences, these containers are a point of contention in ongoing debates about municipal potable water systems, and the presence of branded water in the Mexican market. Plump dogs bear the weight of these containers on their backs, recalling the effigy vessels of Aztec societies in the region of Colima—the place of origin of the artists’ family. Filipek combines additive processes of 3D printing and sculpture to create contemporary mourning symbols of infrastructure blighted by colonization. Conversely, Lu’s work is a maelstrom of liminal identities that articulate themselves in the form of sculptural compositions. At the material level, silicone, concrete, and stainless steel are wrought by hand to create bodily and non-bodily elements: a half-drowned Beast informs a narrative of queerness, Western folklore, and alienation, while a low-relief sculpture coated in silicone reevaluates mythologies of monstrosity and prosthesis. These sculptural forms place water at their center: water acts as the frontier, barrier, and purifier through which all things must pass. Rather than uphold Western contemporary culture as a marker from which to translate, mediate, and sublimate, both Lu and Filipek explore the conceptual legacies inherited from, and very much still alive in, narratives of immigration.