Maximiliano Cervantes American 1999 Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture 2024 In The Permanent Collection of The Museum of Contemporary Photography 2024 Living and Working In My Long-Distance Intimate Auto-Ethnographic Studio 2024 Northwestern University Art, Theory, Practice MFA 2024 The School of The Art Institute of Chicago BFA 2021
The border wall is a parasite that extracts from its host to evolve. The US/Mexico border is used to determine territorial limits that allow for national sovereignty. Yet the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, is the new frontier for an interplanetary society. Within these boundaries - The US/Mexico border wall, The United States Checkpoint, and the Kármán line 60 miles above us - strategies of power are acted out. The blood filled assemblage of capital, counter fits, surveillance, violence, policing, and mass incarceration contribute to sculpting a model migrant or citizen of the borderlands. This person is docile, resilient, able to withstand physical stress, underpaid, and not fast enough. In my long-distance intimate auto-ethnographic studio, I do not work in a series. Works are set in the past, present, and future, works are portraiture, documentation, cardboard boxes, and fabrication of scenarios that create a chain reaction of mythological storytelling beyond the borderlands, 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.