“Borderlands” Solo exhibition
12 May – 17 September, 2022
Open House: Saturday 14 May, 2022. 12pm-6pm*
Artist Reception: Thursday 12 May, 2022. 5-8pm
Mana Contemporary Jersey City
888 Newark Ave, Jersey City, NJ 07306
Press Release
Mana Contemporary Jersey City will present “Borderlands,” a solo exhibition of Hugo Crosthwaite’s work. The exhibition will include two of Crosthwaite’s wall-size mural: “Borderlands,” 2022 (which Crosthwaite will paint on site) and “La Apoteosis de un Taco”/ “The Apotheosis of a Taco,” 2021; two stop-motion animation videos; and a grouping of Crosthwaite’s small and medium sized ink works on paper that capture the chaos and spontaneity of Tijuana, Mexico, the city where Crosthwaite was born and raised and where he currently resides.
“I create works of art that are beautiful. Not a beauty that duplicates the aesthetic molded by advertising and mass media imagery but a personal intimate beauty. The depiction of human suffering and violence permeates my works. The works themselves are not violent, rather thoughtful and rife with seductive imagery. I love the immediacy and tactility of drawing. I let the act of drawing dictate my compositions. My works are completed using graphite, charcoal, and acrylic paint. This medium allows me to seamlessly combine classical figurative representation with modern abstraction. This mixture creates feelings of chaos and spontaneity, reminiscent of Tijuana, Mexico, the city from where I come.” —Hugo Crosthwaite
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Hugo Crosthwaite at Mana Contemporary. Courtesy of Mana Contemporary [above]
Crosthwaite’s “Borderland” series, 2022 [above]
Right:
“Borderlands No.1”
2022
Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on four-ply Museum Board
24 x 24 inches
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Right:
“Borderlands No.2”
2022
Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on four-ply Museum Board
24 x 24 inches
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Left:
“Borderlands No.3”
2022
Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on four-ply Museum Board
24 x 24 inches
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Included in these galleries is Borderlands, a large-scale wall mural commissioned by Mana Contemporary for this exhibition. Over the course of two weeks, Crosthwaite will improvise in acrylic paint imagery that will expand on notions of migration, refugees, and borders. Visitors are welcome to witness Crosthwaite’s creative process, as he paints directly on the gallery wall. At the end of the exhibition, following the artist’s directions, the wall mural will be painted over, resembling the transient conditions of borderlands.
Mural: “La Apoteosis de un Taco,” 2021, Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on Museum Board, 120 x 224 inches overall (21 panels, 40 x 32 ins each panel) [above]
“The twenty-one panel mural La Apoteosis de un Taco, 2021 (The Apotheosis of a Taco) presents a riotous procession of bodies and Tijuana cityscapes in graphite, charcoal, and acrylic paint on Museum Board. The symmetrical composition depicts an unassuming taco, honored, worshipped and surrounded by entangled and variously compromised figures, intermixed with scenes of vernacular street life, religious processions, cityscapes, and taco stands spiked with found poetry in the form of fragmented hand-painted signs. It is a riff on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ grand 1827 painting The Apotheosis of Homer. The mural fuses tender, playful, audacious, and grotesque characters placed as a chorus honoring the allegorical figure of a taco, which stands as a narrative point for the fertile disjunctions of Tijuana’s social and physical landscape with the figure of death as ever-present, in the tragi-comedy of the border city’s life.”
–Hugo Crosthwaite
Right:
Detail Mural: “La Apoteosis de un Taco”
2021
Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on Museum Board
120 x 224 inches overall (21 panels, 40 x 32 ins each panel)
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Left:
Detail Mural: “La Apoteosis de un Taco”
2021
Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on Museum Board
120 x 224 inches overall (21 panels, 40 x 32 ins each panel)
Inquire
This exhibition comprises a video projection and mural installation that features two of Hugo Crosthwaite’s stop-motion drawing animation films. The first film, entitled “A Home for the Brave,” exhibited here for the first time, presents the trials and tribulations of a Mexican migrant family as they are pushed out of their home by narco violence and embark on a dangerous journey across the U.S.– Mexico border in search of an “American Dream.” The second film “Tía Juana mi Amor” serves as a love letter to the border city of Tijuana, Mexico where Hugo Crosthwaite lives and works. The film plays as a kind of architectural treatise that meditates on the concept of “home” and plays with foreign perceptions of the border city of Tijuana as a lawless, chaotic place.
Stop-motion Drawing Animation: 5 stills from “A Home For the Brave,” 2022 [above]
Stop-motion Drawing Animation: 15s clip from “Tía Jiana Mi Amor,” 2020, 5:29 Minutes [above]
Crosthwaite’s “Tijuanerias” series, 2021 [above]
Right:
“Untitled (Eusupio No.14)”
2019
Ink wash and acrylic on paper
14 x 17 inches
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Left:
“Untitled (Eusupio No.5)”
2019
Ink wash and acrylic on paper
14 x 17 inches
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For Crosthwaite, “Tijuanarias” simply refers to anything having to do with the city of Tijuana. Since the 1920’s, Tijuana has been marked as a symbol of perversion and vice, a stigma that continues to define the violence and social upheaval of this border city. Crosthwaite’s “Tijuanarias” depict dark figures in dark places, madmen, prostitutes, drug violence, murder, the powerful and the excesses of narco wealth. Mixed with these foibles and idiosyncrasies are people that appear to be always in transition, crossing or waiting to cross a socio-political and economic border to perceived greener pastures.
Right:
“Charro” from the Chingollywood series
2018
Pencil, charcoal, and acrylic paint on Arches paper
45 x 45 inches
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Left:
“El Bambi” from the Chingollywood series
2018
Pencil, charcoal, and acrylic paint on Arches paper
42 x 42 inches
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“I let the act of drawing dictate my compositions, combining mythical and historical sources with contemporary provocations. Cartoon creatures, commercial facades and strange street characters populate my work, reflecting Mexican culture’s condition of colonization…; all conveying a personal narrative that resembles an abstract urban, chaotic sediment reminiscent of Tijuana….”(Hugo Crosthwaite)
Left:
“Cometa” from the Chingollywood series
2018
Pencil, charcoal, and acrylic paint on Arches paper
45 x 45 inches
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Click here to view more works by Hugo Crosthwaite.
“I love the immediacy and tactility of drawing, the breaking of the white surface with images from my own personal narrative. I let the act of drawing dictate my compositions. My works are completed using graphite and charcoal. This medium allows me to seamlessly combine classical figurative representation with modern abstraction. This mixture creates feelings of chaos and spontaneity, reminiscent of Tijuana, Mexico, the city from where I came. In my depiction of figures, I am dedicated to using classical technique, minute in detail. The absence of color allows each work to be viewed as an objective documentation of events from which the spectator’s involvement is forbidden. It is not my objective to create compositions to which viewers can relate. It is my intent to create works that maintain their mysteriousness in spite of their classical figurative representation.” (Hugo Crosthwaite)
Hugo Crosthwaite was born in Tijuana, Mexico in 1971 and grew up in the tourist-heavy beach town of Rosarito. He received his BA from San Diego State and currently lives and works between Tijuana, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn. He was the winner of the 2019 Smithsocian Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and was chosen to represent Mexico in the California-Pacific Triennial curated by Dan Cameron. Crosthwaite’s work has been included in numerous additional museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Mexico, including: the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, “The New World,” for which he created a 42 foot mural titled “Guadalupana March”; The San Diego Museum of Art, “Behold, America!”; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, “The Very Large Array”; the Chicago Cultural Center, “Morbid Curiosity”’; a solo exhibition at The San Diego Museum of Art, “Brutal Beauty—Drawings by Hugo Crosthwaite,” for which he completed a monumental drawing, over a two-week period at the museum, entitled “A Tail for Two Cities”; “La Primera Bienal de Dibujo de las Americas” (First Biennial of Drawings in the Americas) Rafael Cauduro, Tijuana; and the VII Bienal Monterrey FEMSA de Pintura, Escultura e Instalación, in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico.