Mexotica

Mexotica. By Elaine Peña The Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois. 12 December 2002.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performances are noted for their engagement with issues of race, culture, and nation by visually re-creating shared notions of the popular and the familiar. Similarly, his collaborative performances create spaces of interrogation filled with icons, stereotypes, our familiars, and he makes them strange. The living and the dead--the performers, the spectators, and statues capable of evoking historias that books and memories have forgotten--are all employed to question our collective and personal politics, spirituality and desire. Mexotica, a “living museum” exhibit continued this level of engagement. Gómez-Peña and his colleagues Juan Ybarra and Michelle Ceballos from the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra as well as selected Columbia College students collaborated for two weeks to create this eagerly anticipated performance installation coined ...