Pete Hoffecker Mejia
This work is engaged with the negotiation of multiform
cultural identities. I am expressly concerned with exploring the
intersection of contrasting cultural information, hierarchies of
representation, and conflation in the expression of otherness.
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, of indigenous ancestry, adopted by
a multiracial family, and raised in the United States, I have
created a studio practice that serves as a space for mediation
of the resulting geographic and cultural estrangement. Cut
and reassembled serape blankets, mochila pattern, molas, and
other fragments of a whole speak to cultural and geographic
discontinuity. Interrogating the themes of European geometric
abstraction and Indigenous art forms allows me to create a
sculptural narrative of contemporary Latin-American and
Indigenous cultural hybridity, with acknowledgment of the
postcolonial landscape.
High art and low, the historical and the ahistorical, the found and
the fabricated, caricature and the sincere, all collide and collude.
In this way, I explore the blurred points of contact resulting from
estrangement, while touching on the obstacles in mediating self
through distorted representations of the other in mass culture.