Homesick

JO-HS CDMX presents Homesick, a group exhibition curated by Fabiola Talavera (Monterrey, 1995), open from the 8th of June until the 18th of August 2023. 

Homesick brings together the work of eleven artists from different latitudes that have made Mexico their home, and locals who have departed to other territories: Avantgardo, Nicolás Colón, Bruno Enciso, Floria González, Maximiliano León, Samuel Nicolle, Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, Isaac De Reza, José De Sancristóbal, Charlie Godet Thomas and Andrea Villalón.

The title of the show, ‘Homesick’, alludes to the yearning for a time and space that is not found anymore in the present. As manifested by the works in the exhibition, the concept of home is not necessarily associated with a geographical place, but rather persons of the past, objects of everyday life, family histories and formative youth times. Thus, homesickness appears as a deeper human longing to cling unto something familiar, a recognizable shelter in an entropic ever-changing world.

About Fabiola Talavera
Fabiola Talavera (Monterrey, 1995) is an independent curator, writer, archivist and cultural producer based in Mexico City, who has worked with different private and public institutions in Mexico, United States, Australia and New Zealand, in exhibitions, festivals, research projects and documental archives. She has a bachelor’s degree in Art Theory and History by the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City. In recent years, she was in charge of the Poesía en Voz Alta Digital Archive and the conceptualization of the Resquicio project space for Casa del Lago UNAM. Since 2023, she co-curates the program of Montez Press Radio Mexico with Leah Whitman-Salkin.

About the artists

Andrea Villalón
Andrea Villalón is a multi-disciplinary visual artist known for her introspective and autobiographical themes in painting, photography, and stained glass. Born in 1995 in Uruapan, Michoacán, her work delves into personal identity and introspection through the use of symbolic elements and the documentation of everyday experiences. From the ordinary routines like meals to haircuts, self-inflicted cigarette burns and her beloved cats, pills, books, and relationships to personal belongings and people, Andrea explores the complexities of modern womanhood. Her art encompasses emotions and concerns such as temporal progression, dreams, the modern world, memory, femininity, solitude, the chthonic, and aging, all stemming from an existencial world view emphasizing the importance of an authentic connection to the world. Andrea has exhibited her work at art fairs including Nada NYC, Enter Art Fair, and Material. After having two solo shows in Mexico City and being previously represented by Machete Gallery, Andrea Villalón is now under the representation of Brigade in Europe, where she had her debut solo show in Copenhagen in 2020. Currently based in London, Andrea advocates for self-exploration and self-understanding as a path to simplicity in life.

Bruno Enciso
Bruno Enciso (b. 1995) is an art writer, independent curator and self taught artist based in Mexico City. His works explore the relation between drawing and painting as always-available approaches to visual art and continues his permanent investigation on visuality and the contemporary image. He's currently conectrated on the topic of vases and wild flowers, taking them as devices to essay the idea of the domestic, the intimate and the emotional memory. As a writer and curator, he has collaborated with several artists and projects considering writing and accompaniment as artistics processes by themselves.

Nicolás Colón
Nicolás Colón's artistic practice delves into the intricate crossroads of intimacy, memory, and the poetics of everyday life. Within a predominantly autobiographical framework. Through their work, Colón delicately unravels the entangled threads that tether us to the world, providing a rich, textured, and nuanced examination of contemporary life. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Colón holds a degree in Sculpture from the renowned California College of the Arts. Their work has been showcased in solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Milan, as well as in group exhibitions internationally.

Avantgardo
Avantgardo (b. 1996) is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is characterized by combining different cultural devices to work with desire and its manifestations in consumer culture. Avantgardo proposes cheap luxury and pop simulacrum as concepts to understand the constitutive role of consumption and spectacle in subjectivities. His process takes as its starting point the readymade at the present time, assumes the purchase as a form of research on the commodification of desire and consumption as a means of communication to reinterpret, parody and recreate products as a testimony of the consumer society
and the Contemporary life.

Floria Gonzalez
Floria González (b. 1980) was born in Monterrey NL, moving to Acuña, Coahuila in 1983, she moved to Mexico City at the age of 16 where she currently lives and works. Through fiction, her photographic work captures alternate realities of the psyche by creating a universe of characters and settings. Through photography, video, installation, performance and painting, Floria maintains a constant dialogue between fantasy and imagination, evoking a set of forms that reconstruct her own identity through her memories and experiences. She has participated in exhibitions in Mexico City, Monterrey, New York, Austin, TX, Los Angeles, Miami, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Berlin, Italy, Hong Kong, London and Singapore among others.

Isaac De Reza
Isaac De Reza is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on process and research strategies through radical imagination and versatility of thought; he develops methods of thinking that play with pre-set expectations viewers may have on formal aspects of performance, painting and sculpture, so to incite a questioning of our subjective understanding of society and culture. He cares about the work having an impact on others through building a sense of relatedness about feelings bigger than us, that resist language and clarification and that yet are a socially shared experiences.

José De Sancristóbal
José De Sancristóbal (b. 1995, Monterrey) is an artist that explores the interplay between narrative and image-making processes, examining how these interact to construct meaning and shape perception. Employing photography, video, film, and installation, he delves into the personal, shared, and inherited stories that create a sense of self beyond the frame of a single life. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Universidad de Monterrey, during which he also studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. He has been a Fellow of the Young Creators Program (Jóvenes Creadores) from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in Mexico, and was awarded an acquisition prize for the 2nd edition of Nuevo Leon’s State Art Award. He is the recipient of the Graduate Research Grant and the Paschke Grant at Northwestern University, and received his MFA from Northwestern University as a Fulbright-García Robles Fellow. His work has been exhibited at Casa Del Lago, Mexico City; Biquini Wax, Mexico City; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; FF projects, Monterrey; Festival Internacional Santa Lucía, Monterrey; City Surfer Office, Prague; Glassbox, Paris; among others. He co-directed Malteada La Vida, an artist-run space in Monterrey, from 2017 to 2019, and is currently collaborating with Isaac Vázquez in a curatorial project titled Reference: in Chicago.

Charlie Godet Thomas
Charlie Godet Thomas (b. London. British-Bermudian, 1985) currently lives and works between Mexico City (MX) and London (UK). His work employs a wide range of approaches including writing, painting, sculpture, assemblage, photography, sound and video. His work is concerned with the connections between visual art and literature, the act of writing, the autobiographical, the tragic and the humorous. His work is summoned from unlikely places such as bookbinding processes, street signage, funereal foam letters and the language of pharmaceutical packaging.

Maximiliano León
Maximiliano León studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Daniel Richter, and at the Esmeralda with José Luis Sánchez Rull and Sofia Táboas. The body of his work focuses on colonialism, the painter's situation in his studio and the problems of the search for his own identity due to the multicultural growth between Mexico and Austria. The spectrum of protagonists is proportionally broad, a heterogeneous team ranging from historical personalities, landscapes, pop culture icons, to still life objects that surround the painter in his daily life. In his paintings he plays with the themes of his ancestry, colonialism and history. His works have been exhibited in New York, Miami, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mexico City, Tijuana, Vienna, Berlin, Mönchengladbach, Gdansk among others.

Samuel Nicolle
Samuel Nicolle (b. 1992) is a visual artist who works through sculptures and performances to generate situations where each of these elements unfolds into another in order to explore the possibility of being image, being object and to question the ways of seeing. Her work unfolds ecosystems of melancholic interiors soaked in traces of human presence. Nicolle explores LGBTTTIQ+ history and genealogy making use of its codes to generate rituals of excitement and frustration challenging the difference between true and false, real and imaginary based on the creation of seemingly whimsical and frivolous fictions. She is currently pursuing a master's degree in visual arts at UNAM. She was a member of SOMA's educational program which she completed in 2020. She obtained her bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from the Ecole Supérieure des Arts de Paris-Cergy.

Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh
Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh (b. 1980, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, vocal performance, and emerging technologies. Akwetey's work concerns the mythology of the future and the way in which “ancestral, cultural and digital memories transform contemporary visual language". He received his BFA from Amherst College. Orraca-Tetteh's work has been included in exhibitions at The New Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Palais De Tokyo, Photo London at Somerset House, and The Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. His work has been featured in Artforum, BOMB, Frieze, Rhizome, OkayAfrica, Widewalls, and The New Yorker. He is based in Mexico City, Los Angeles and Accra(Ghana).