Pepe Mar: You Should Have Never Crossed the Rio Grande

David Castillo presents “You Should Have Never Crossed the Rio Grande“, a solo exhibition of fabric paintings and assemblages by Pepe Mar. 

Mar considers how migratory experiences influence his practice in the context of a city like Miami—where he lives and works and where visual culture is inflected by a diversity of diasporas. 

Across the various pieces on view, Mar interlaces material references to the histories of art and museological practice; found objects and artifacts gathered from secondhand shops with ties to South Florida’s queer enclaves; and personal, pop-cultural obsessions; elements that together form highly layered frameworks of aesthetic, symbolic, and cultural meaning that point towards the overarching—yet unanswerable—question that the artist poses with this exhibition: “Would my life and practice have developed differently had I stayed in Mexico?” 

The exhibition traces how the artist, and his practice by extension, absorbs and reflects his own social and cultural milieu; through the works on view, the show makes the case that a person and practice differently situated—be that in a country of origin or emerging from another life experience—would not be able to create in a manner attuned to the distinct contexts that Mar now finds himself within.