EXHIBITION

Dab Art Co. is pleased to present MESTIZAJE, a solo exhibition of works by Dante Migone-Ojeda. View the online exclusive MESTIZAJE in its entirety on our collectors platform ARTSY (Jul 11 - Oct 11, 2022).

For second generation immigrants in the United States, religion and culture are often passed down hand in hand, intertwining religious practice with a connection to a homeland that is more often than not a vanishing idea. Often, religious communities double as ethnic enclaves. Here, the religious becomes the cultural, serving as the strongest tether to one’s personal history. This comes with its own complications; religion is by nature about rules and stricture, culture about malleability and adaptation. What emerges from this mix is a new sort of syncretism, blending together cultural influences from the diaspora experience and the ritualism and tradition present in religion; known as Mestizaje.

Dante’s work employs the framework of syncretism as a means of complicating the often abstract structures of colonialism, religion, and diaspora as they relate directly to the body, and to the second generation immigrant experience. By re-coding and re-contextualizing a variety of found objects and symbols, brought together using text, image, and collage, Dante examines Mestizaje through the lens of syncretic religious practice, complete with its alternating and simultaneous intimacy and violence. Drawing on elements of ritual and hyper-sensation, he implicates his viewers as voyeuristic visitors, pulled into a reimagining of desire, subjugation, spirituality, and language. Through an interplay of the familiar alongside the arcane, the comfortable alongside the fraught, the sacred alongside the sullied, and the blurring of the boundaries between each of them, Dante centers their commonality and redefine their meanings. In so doing, he challenges the hegemonic white colonial constructs that overshadow the construction of American identity, and chart a new path rooted in the syncretic culture of diaspora.

Currently, my work is focused on a practice of the earliest conquistadors in the Americas; they would sever the hands of the indigenous warriors who survived their battles, tie them around their necks, and send them to nearby villages, as a warning. I re-imagine these hands as monuments to desire, tenderness, and survival. By positioning these hands in gestures of prayer and affection, I blend together elements of eroticism, violence, and Catholic ritual, complicating the interrelated influences of religion, conquest, and culture in the emergence of Mestizaje. In rising as the hegemonic culture of Latin America, it is a testament to survival and syncretic adaptation, while also a symbol of the erasure and further marginalization of the indigenous peoples who are so often forgotten in conversations around Latino identity. This series of works acknowledges the deeply complex and difficult history that gave rise to this identity, and questions what it means in the context of the United States, as the new colonial power of the Americas. In a nation that so often flattens questions of identity to checked boxes and prescribed personhood, I want to understand what role these complicated histories play, and how they shape our relationship to a country where we are forever seen as outsiders.

-DANTE MIGONE-OJEDA

Private viewing rooms, artwork details and and collector acquisitions are available on ARTSY.

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