Prompt: The “beyond” most immediately recalls those unknowable spaces at the far edge of horizon lines, charged with the promise of embryonic possibility. To the extent that it ushers in something new, however, the beyond is nevertheless inflected by what happened before and what is currently taking place. Rather than a clean break, the beyond then offers the potential for realignments that bend and even mend the past. For Paloma Contreras Lomas, whose work El más allá Mexicano (The Mexican Beyond) (2020) provides the title for this exhibition, the beyond is figured as an anthropomorphized avatar for Mexico’s rural landscape, one inspiring a complex entanglement of awe, fetishization, nostalgia, and even fear when viewed from an urban Mexican perspective. For the other artists in the show, all of whom are from or are based in Mexico City, the beyond is framed as a historical orientation towards times past through the vestiges of prehispanic iconography, colonial artefacts and postmodern consumer culture that animate their work.

For Julieta Gil, the beyond reevaluates institutions – past, present, and future. In this instance, an archeological interpretation of façade elements from the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The fragmented forms dissect the narrative of neo-indigenous ornaments that adorned the building during a period of dictatorship. For Noe Martínez and María Sosa, the beyond is an archive, offering a source for investigation. By means of field research and ethnographic compilation, Noe Martinez incises the past to consider the throughlines that exist today. From the “Mollera” series, this work reconstructs the conception of the body from the Mexican Nahua indigenous context through a poetical dimension of fragmentation to understand the relation amongst the cosmovision of disease and the ritual processes of healing.

Borrowing anthropological and historical research methodologies, Sosa excavates symbols of a pre-Hispanic past to find alternative perspectives for contemporary issues. The project included here focuses on the Conquest of America as this neuralgic point that triggers the various conditions in which our present is continually being built. For Débora Delmar, the beyond remixes symbols of colonial culture with leisure culture today. She specifically looks at the history of coffee cultivation and uses in Mexico to address class mobility, status, and value structures of consumption.

For Tomás Díaz Cedeño and Carlos H. Matos, the beyond is materially grounded with the earth, to imagine new utopian forms while considering entropy and regrowth.From his most recent series, “Sobre tierra roja,” Díaz Cedeño uses clay and steel to craft ceramics that feel both primordial and fossils of a distant future. In incorporating vegetal, animal, and human elements, this work navigates the relationships between the natural and the artificial and landscape and architecture.

Riffing on pre-Hispanic architecture and design styles and informed by his formal architecture training, Matos uses wood to construct a structure for a potential utopian landscape. Through an idiosyncratic vocabulary of forms, his work constellates a quasi-fictional realm— complete with ruins, rituals, and routines, and even characters whose existence is only hazily implied. For Samuel Guerrero and SANGREE, the beyond is a perspectival shift on the relationship between technology and the spiritual realm, with skepticism of allegedly rational Western thought. Guerrero’s 3D-engraved glass sculptures are an exercise in world-building, in which he reimagines landscapes that transgress linear time and technological determinism. He intermixes Aztec figures and loose reinterpretations of pre-Hispanic motifs in intimate pairings and fantastic environments.

SANGREE’s neons imbed a humorous critique on ideas on perspective—refraction, diffraction, reflection—opening space for peripheral systems of belief. The eyes cheekily survey the room, with a knowing glance, an equal mix of cynicism and mysticism. For these artists, the beyond is less strictly geographic but is nevertheless tied to a psycho-spatial complex in which the ancestral, the monumental, the pop, the modern, the intellectual, the natural, and the future intersect at the blurry fringe of intelligibility. At turns autobiographical and analytic, these artists’ pursuits of the beyond restructure prevailing narratives and, in their place, propose new perspectives on gender, material culture, colonial history, and their relationship with the earth.

Working in collaboration with the Mexico City-based architecture studio Lanza atelier, the ground-floor works were placed atop uniquely designed plinths to create a constellation of small monuments, fragments, and icons within the cosmos of the spatial universe of the building’s architecture. Taking spatial design cues from a flower field or Piedra del Sol, usually called the Aztec calendar wheel, the design allows small power to radiate out from these totems, exploring our understanding of space and scale within larger conceptions of historical time and the beyond.

Image credit: SANGREE, Suspicious Refraction, 2021