Shortly after returning home to San Francisco from the Yucatan, where I first met Edgar Pacheco in the spring of 1993, I painted this mural in the storefront at 537 Divisadero. I suspected that Edgar wanted to come here to San Francisco to live, in large part to escape the feeling of servitude he suffered working for his father on the family farm. I wanted my art to have the power to draw him to my home to live. I went so far as to follow some vague memory I had of a Santería ritual where I entwined a few of his pubic hairs with those of mine and Andres's (which I had saved from our bedding in a room of their aunt's motel on Isla Mujeres) and buried them inside a rotten pumpkin in my garden. By the time the calabaza vines blossomed he had arrived in San Francisco, but he didn't come to live at my place for yet another year.
This painting shows Edgar and Andres at Uxmal, and some manikins, umbrellas and a blue car (which I photographed not far from the Zócalo in DF) displayed before the pyramid at Chichén Itzá. I intended the later image to comment on the commercialisation of that site and the way it had been reduced to a common backdrop image in advertising. The images of Andres and Edgar and the various structures at Uxmal were based on photographs I took while there with those two friends. These areas of the mural were intended to convey a sense of their ancestral and spiritual connection to those ancient buildings and the imagery of the temple decoration. In the first panel Edgar is specifically likened to a Rain God.
No comments:
Post a Comment