The term Border Art can be traced back to the US–Mexico frontier in 1984, when the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) was founded in San Diego. Counting David Avalos, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Sara-Jo Berman among its members, the group worked predominantly in conceptual and performance art addressing the political situation in the region. As the border came to be defined by the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, both BAW/TAF and InSite, the influential cross-border art event that ran from 1992 to 2005, interrogated what it means to protect freedom of trade while harshly restricting the movement of people.
These are the histories that have nourished the art of Chantal Peñalosa, born in 1987 in Tecate, Baja California. The title Unfinished Business Garage hints at her relationship to the work of her predecessors, whose legacy remains highly present locally, while part of it looks and feels like a memorial to an era past. Peñalosa has framed archival photographs of works created for InSite by artists including Helen Escobedo, Silvia Gruner, Alfredo Jaar and Marcos Ramírez ERRE and placed them in the locations on both sides of the border where the projects they document originally took place. In a gesture that both puts these ghosts to rest and appropriates their glories – like most memorials – she photographed the framed pictures on location and shows them here with updated titles inscribed on tiny gold plaques: Afterlife of By The Night Tide by Helen Escobedo, 1994 (2019); Afterlife of The Middle of the Road by Silvia Gruner, 1994 (2019); Afterlife of The Cloud by Alfredo Jaar, 2000 (2019), etc.
Another piece in this sparse show sets Peñalosa’s desire to understand the artists in whose footsteps she follows, the big names whose big gestures defined the Border Art movement, against their work’s resistance to simple meaning. Unfinished Business Garage I/V (2019–23) comprises a series of metal shelving units (of the kind you might find gathering dust in a garage) holding a disparate array of objects: ceramic snakes, a pre-Hispanic(ish)- looking clay mask, the silhouette of a cowboy hat carved in stone, tools, boxes, clothes. Peñalosa met with students at the art department of Tijuana’s Universidad Autónoma de Baja California to investigate the ‘forms’ that border artists used in their works in those genredefining years, and these are the resulting formal experiments (the forward-looking date might express the hope that this is an exercise to be continued). Whether the nondescript look of the objects is itself a calculated gesture is unclear: they seem inchoate, unsure of their place in a legacy. However successfully the collective exercise translates into the exhibition setting, it’s clear that Peñalosa is trying to disentangle what this very recent art history could mean to us today. It’s not an easy diagnosis to make: what can the forms and discourses that she holds in high regard pass on to her and her art community, at a time when borders and the logic that enforces them are more violent and determined than ever?
Chantal Peñalosa, Unfinished Business Garage, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City, 7 November – 21 December 2019
From the March 2020 issue of ArtReview
