The Beyond
at Base Agency

The Beyond (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artists and Base Agency.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the author thinks of a bag as a metaphor for writing science fiction novels, a container that carries words and experiences picked up through the ebb and flow of life. The Beyond, a group show organized by Base Agency and a group of CDMX-based galleries (Campeche, Llano, Lodos, Galería Mascota, Peana, and Pequod Co.) as part of its Argón series, adopts Le Guin’s notion of storytelling in an ad-hoc space in DTLA: wooden pedestals modeled after the Aztec sun stone hold an array of objects, each one a container carrying fragments of Mexico’s complicated past. The objects on view embrace abstraction and the stories they tell sit waiting to be deciphered, as if challenging the viewer away from any straightforward read.

Julieta Gil’s Fragmentos: Los Verdaderos Colores de Bellas Artes (2016), imagines the destruction of Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts by presenting, quite literally, 3-D printed fragments of its shattered façade. The palace was commissioned by former president, Porfirio Díaz, in 1904, who envisioned Mexico as French architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann did during the renovation of Paris (via wider boulevards and the building of civic structures like opera houses). Mexico City’s Palace is a neoclassical landmark, but also a site of power anchored in the aristocratic opulence that marked Diaz’s 31-year regime during the 19th century—a period that Gil refers to as a “dictatorship” in lectures, though it is rarely regarded as such in official records. Here, its smooth white marble surface is broken, turned into soft pink and purple debris, weightless and frail.

In thinking about history’s fragments, I am reminded about the missionary work of Franciscan friars who contributed to the evangelization of New Spain. Through an ancestral technique known as Tatzingueni, María Sosa’s sculpture, made from sugar cane, embodies a newborn-sized infant carrying miniature illustrations of churches, friars, and demons inside its concave belly. Her choice of material points, perhaps implicitly, to the labor exploitation that enslaved people—a sector that priests defended from Spanish troops by deeming them defenseless and weak—endured in sugar plantations. Débora Delmar takes a similar approach but from a postmodern perspective. Her glazed porcelain espresso machine, titled Oblo White (2016), resembles the mass-produced commodities, pointing to the extractivism of foreign corporations. While Nescafé finances coffee plantations in Veracruz, Starbucks sells roasted coffee beans across Mexico.

Installed on a lower floor in the gallery space, darkened by the absence of windows and stripped walls, Paloma Contreras Lomas’ video El más allá Mexicano (2020), or “the Mexican beyond,” was filmed with a phone camera, and features a male narrator describing (and sometimes fetishizing) the desolate landscape of Sierra Hermosa, a small mining town in Zacatecas. His voice exhibits traces of guilt, questioning his position as an artist, an onlooker meeting miners bound to the arid climate and yellowed pastures. The video complicates our relationship to The Beyond, inviting us as viewers to identify with the narrator, an uncomfortable spectator observing how others write their own histories.

Though most sculptures at The Beyond rest on wooden pedestals, Samuel Guerrero’s laser engraved glass sculptures sit on metallic plinths, lit from below. In one of them, cyborg-like beings kiss and caress, affirming the possibility of a queer futurity. In the other, a nude woman floats above the Coyolxauhqui—an archeological relic representative of the Aztec moon goddess. A question written below in Spanish reads: “Little star, are you looking for a place to land?” The question serves as a reminder that the stories found in The Beyond resist easy decoding, and instead hint at themes in coded language. They are not based on fiction, but rather carry historical interpretations that demand careful contemplation.

The Beyond runs from February 16–April 2, 2022 at Base Agency (110 W. 11th St., Los Angeles, CA 90015).

Samuel Guererro, Parados sobre las betas rozando las estrellas (installation view) (date). Image courtesy of the artist and Base Agency.

Débora Delmar, Oblo White (2016). Ceramic and polished steel, 9.75 x 13 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Base Agency.

The Beyond (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artists and Base Agency.

Julieta Gil, Fragmentos: Los Verdaderos Colors de Bellas Artes: Lobo (detail) (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Base Agency.

The Beyond (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artists and Base Agency.

Paloma Contreras Lomas, El Más Allá Mexicano (installation view) (2020). Image courtesy of the artist and Base Agency.

Carlos H. Matos, Bust (2022). Wood, gesso, and pigments, 134.5 x 48.25 x 48.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Base Agency.

Nahui Garcia is an art historian and curator currently living in Los Angeles. She is an MA candidate in the Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program at USC Roski School of Art and Design. 

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