Maximiliano Cervantes Harlingen, Texas 1999 Living and Working In My Long Distance Intimate Autoethnographic Studio Chicago, IL 2024 The School of The Art Institute of Chicago BFA 2021 Northwestern University Art, Theory, And Practice MFA 2024


maximilianocervan@gmail.com


Recent Works

Santos
BarbedWire12.0
Info


In my practice, I create images that evoke the collapse of Mars and the wastelands of the borderlands. My borderlands, The Rio Grande Valley, Texas, a site of Gore Capitalism, is becoming the new frontier for an interplanetary society. Within these borders - The US/Mexico border wall, The United States Checkpoint, and the Kármán line 60 miles above us - strategies of power are acted out. The assemblage of surveillance, physical barriers, policing, and mass incarceration, contribute to sculpting a model migrant or citizen of the borderlands. This ideal person is docile, resilient, able to withstand physical stress, underpaid, and not fast enough. In my long-distance intimate autoethnographic studio, I engage in the standardization of image- making. Images are set in the past, present, and future, images as living landscapes, portraiture, documentation, and fabrication of anthropological studies create a chain reaction of mythological storytelling, crossing evidence with alchemy. My starting point is the presence of aerospace factories in these lands. These companies are SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. I appropriate from my father's labor as a factory worker, down to .001 inches of sweat. He worked as a structural mechanic for 34 years at United Launch Alliance, an intimate relationship between Lockheed Martin and Boeing in Harlingen, Texas. During breaks and dirty jokes, my dad and his friends shot magically sanitized rivets, constructing the Atlas V rocket. The payload faring includes the Mars Curiosity Rover as well as the means for space exploration, colonization, warfare, surveillance satellites, militarized communications, and weather analysis. I use curiosity and technical perfection in my gridded dioramas, large-scale inkjet prints, to magnify the catastrophe of these worlds collapsing. The body is staged, shirtless, dusty, with stainless steel reflection, sterilized for new lands.


Mars Atlas 
Cardboard Box
2024
13” x 13” x 10”

Kármán Line (Sky Border)
Inkjet Print
2024
56 x 42”


Kármán Line (Sky Border)
Inkjet Print
2024
56 x 42”


Kármán Line (Sky Border)
Inkjet Print
2024
56 x 42”
 

Worker (1989-2023)
2024
Inkjet Prints 
 11 x 17”

Field of Battle
2024
Inkjet Print 
40 x 31.5”

Stainless Steel Reflection
2023
Inkjet Print
39.5 x 53”

SpaceX Factory and Launch Site Boca Chica, Texas
2023
Inkjet Print
29.5 x 40”


Backside of National Geographic Mars Map
2023
Inkjet Print
 40 x 53.25”


Andesite
2023
Inkjet Print
20 x 27”

Desk
2023
Inkjet Print
35 x 46.5”


2023
Inkjet Print 
56 x 132”


Lockheed Martin Sand Drawing
2023
Inkjet Print
14 x 20”

2023
Inkjet Print
37.5 x 28”


Brick 001
2023
Inkjet Print
25 x 18”


2023
Inkjet Print 
55 x 42”

Install 2023 


2023
Inkjet Print
55 x 42”


2023

inkjet Print
40 x 31.5”

Install 2023




2023
Inkjet Print
40 x 33.5”


2023
Inkjet Print on Amate Paper

7.5 x 180”