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“Material Art Fair”, Mexico City, February 8 – 11, 2018
Pepe Mar works from a tribal iconography that references his native Mexico, all tribal cultures, and also none. The sacred mythologies of his oeuvre take the form of celebrity gossip and tabloid news—the sources for the collage clippings that compose much of his work across paper and sculpture, and more recently painting. His visual vocabulary demarcates self-fashioned worlds and a cargo cult of found objects that take on the form of gods and goddesses, great beasts and apocalyptic destroyers. Mar blurs the boundaries of fantasy and reality, past and present, print media and myriad belief systems, offering bold but dubious origins for his contemporary folklore. Invention through mutation is another tool of speculative realism, not least for practitioners of color, who often do not have the privilege of discounting primary injustices when conceptualizing surrogate worlds. "The idea of separating science fiction from realism, it’s like separating the present from the past and the future," acclaimed Afro- Futurist author Nnedi Okorafor remarks. "Those aren’t separated, those are all combined.”