Pata Rajada: The Works of David Cuatlacuatl

Presented by The Eric Sweet Memorial Fund

Exhibition Dates: August 29-September 29, 2022

Reception: Thursday, September 8, 4:30-6:00pm

Curator's talk with Federico Cuatlacuatl via Zoom: Wednesday, September 28 at 6pm

Meeting ID: 978 5959 2554 Passcode: 653192

Nearly one hundred works are featured in the traveling exhibition, Pata Rajada, a

memorial exhibition of David Cuatlacuatl’s artistic endeavors. These works are

curated by his brother, Federico, and reflect his artistic practice spanning over

almost a decade during his undergraduate school at Ball State University,

graduate school at Pennsylvania State University, and works developed post

graduate school in Toledo, Ohio. David Cuatlacuatl’s works are heavily influenced

from his own experience growing up as an undocumented immigrant and coping

with the notions of adaptability and constantly reinventing oneself as a mode of

diasporic survival:

“Journeys begin in places of uncertainty, whether artistic or geographical. In the

process, the original idea, which catalyzed the journey, is deconstructed and

often elided completely in the final destination/ finished product. The meeting of

divergent identities gives importance to movement, migration. In my practice, a

single formal decision can take me to a place of dissatisfaction or sense of

incompleteness; so too the migrant is perpetually unfinished. Instead of a living

embodiment of one’s place of origin, a person is a work of art constantly in

revision. My work is both a means of coming to terms with my immigrant status

of dislocation and is itself a type of journey in miniature. By absorbing, digesting,

and visualizing the various identities and places I have inhabited, my artwork lays

claim to the ill-defined and in-between spaces. I plant my flag in ever-shifting

soil.

The confident sensation of rootedness is perhaps our most important and least

recognized need. Rootedness gives stability to identity but also bears the

potential of devolving into fervent nationalism and racism. I respond to an age of

intense mobility, both voluntary and coerced, with hybrid processes and mixed

media. A dislocated temporal presence is connoted using found materials, which

carry the imprint of their former lives. Selected application of assemblage

disorients the fictional and illusionistic space connoted within the frame.”

-David Cuatlacuatl