Raul J. Mendez
Gallery Affiliations: Hinge Gallery
Region: Pacific Coast
Website: http://www.rauljmendez.com
City / State: Portland, OR
I am curious about people and their relationships with themselves, each other, and their surrounding world, as my main interest lies in probing the human condition. Observing the uneasy tensions between tragedy and comedy informs my work profoundly. As a result, the work takes on the roles of metaphor, parable or pun through the use of fragmented narratives that provide a viewer the before or after of a story without ever fully revealing what actually took place. This latest body of work was executed in order to examine the spaces we occupy, and the mindsets or mental states they imply. It subverts contemporary narratives with metaphors of absurdity and displacement; unlikely pairings like humor and horror, heroics and vulnerability, laughter and sadness, are confronted in an arena somewhere between the imagined and the observed.