Henry Art Gallery to Present ektor garcia: matéria prima | April 2 – September 4, 2022

Across his artistic practice, ektor garcia (b. 1985, Red Bluff, California) challenges the hierarchies of gendered and racialized labor, combining a queer punk sensibility with the handcraft traditions of Mexico, his ancestral homeland.  

In textiles, ceramics, and metalwork, frequently in combination with found materials, garcia engages vernacular and craft practices historically cast in diminutive or marginalized roles, ascribing renewed value through intimate, repetitive processes. The resulting objects are hybrid in nature—both malleable and solid, dense and porous, sharp and tender—evoking the body and its labor as a source of pleasure and pain, rupture and healing. Pieces are often reconfigured; textiles are made and unmade. Undoing the knots is as important as reknotting to find new points of connection and possibility. 

For his exhibition at the Henry, garcia worked with faculty, staff, and students at the University of Washington’s Ceramic and Metal Arts Building to create a series of linked-chain sculptures made in ceramic, copper, and glass. Comprised of individual, interlocking links, these chains form a series of mutual and contingent relationships across their constitutive parts. Each link varies slightly and holds the memory of hands touching materials. The title of the exhibition, matéria prima, is a play on words that references garcia’s process: matéria prima (raw material) also includes the Spanish word prima (cousin). This double meaning reflects both the generative potential of garcia’s cumulative process and the relational affinities across materials and maker. 

Organized in variable permutations dependent on the space, garcia’s installations are an accumulation of objects, disrupting spatial hierarchies with sculptures sprawled across floors and dispersed throughout the supporting architecture. At the Henry, butterflies made of crocheted copper wire escape the confines of the gallery and inhabit interstitial spaces of the museum, directing visitors’ attention to less assuming locations within the building. A recurring motif across garcia’s work, the butterfly is a potent symbol of transformation and migration, and for garcia, also alludes to the derogatory, Spanish term for gay men used in Mexico mariposa (butterfly). In his hands, garcia reclaims this symbol. In a gesture emblematic of his larger practice, he recoups the socially devalued through acts of ritual care. 

A complimentary publication will accompany the exhibition.

ektor garcia earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University. He has complete residencies at Progetto, Puglia, Italy; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Cove Park, Argyll and Bute, Scotland; and Ox-Bow, Saugatuck, Michigan. garcia has held solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, among others. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, China; New Museum, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; and Prospect, New Orleans.

ektor garcia is a participating artist in the Henry’s Artist Fellowship Program, which is intended to advance artistic inquiry through the mutual exchange between invited artists and the larger University of Washington community. It is designed as a generative program that promotes dynamic collaboration and facilitates artistic development, aligning the Henry’s commitment to innovation and inquiry with the University’s standing as a leader in research. The 2022 pilot year of the Artist Fellowship Program is made possible by the Jones Endowed Fund for the Arts.