Dragon Crab and Turtle is pleased to present Chuecos, a solo exhibition by Adrian Gonzalez.

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Adrian Gonzalez explores reproduction and knockoff culture through the overlapping histories and visual languages of Latin and American culture. Working across printmaking, painting, and sculpture, his practice examines cultural inheritance and the ways images and objects change as they move between cultures, languages, and materials.

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He calls many of his works Bobos, borrowing a word used for knockoffs and off-brand goods. Rather than understanding the Bobo as a failed version of an original, He considers the possibilities that emerge through the new copy, substitutions, inventions, and cultural shifts that happen as something moves from one place, person, language, or material to another.

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This thinking becomes a metaphor for language, particularly Spanglish—a language itself often treated as an incorrect or lesser version of English and Spanish. Gonzalez instead understands Spanglish as an inventive language produced through translation, adaptation, and necessity. His work operates similarly, building a kind of visual Spanglish in which images, materials, languages, histories, and traditions are borrowed and recombined without much concern for keeping things pure. Something is always a little chueco. Chueco is a word Gonzalez grew up hearing in his family. It can mean crooked, bent, off, suspicious, or something that isn't quite right.

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This way of making also comes from Gonzalez's relationship to Ecuadorian Monigotes, roughly made effigies constructed from papier-mâché, newspaper, cardboard, old clothing, and other available materials. Monigotes typically take the form of political figures, celebrities, cartoons, comic characters, and people from everyday life before being burned during New Year's celebrations. They are temporary doubles—rough mirrors of people and things made ultimately to disappear. Gonzalez borrows from the Monigote's logic of the stand-in. Objects and figures become bodies, and ordinary materials pretend to be something they are not. Paper becomes a shoe, a hat, a can, a plant. Aluminum foil becomes a surface for painting and then becomes a wrapper again.

 

Adrian Gonzalez (b. 1987) lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has exhibited at The Print Center (Philadelphia), Highpoint Center for Printmaking, The Harn Museum of Art, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, Orlando Museum of Art, and Bruno David Gallery. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

 

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