Artifacts and Fictions: An Interview
with Peter Hoffecker-Mejia

When
Christianity arrived in the America’s, the church attempted to convert the
indigenous peoples that greeted them. Those who resisted that conversion were
met with violence, and more often than not, death. Many accepted that
conversion which resulted in a present-day Latin America where almost 81% of
the population identifies as Catholic and the rest as a combination of various
denominations of Christianity and other world faiths; 40% of the world’s
Catholic population resides in Latin America alone. Upon closer examination, it
becomes clear that the intentions of the European conquistadors were only
partially successful. While these indigenous populations accepted the rites and
rituals of a new faith, it was not at the cost of losing the existing systems
of faith and worship that had long been established within their own cultural
practices. The result is a modern-day religiosity composed of beliefs and
practices that pushes both Christian and indigenous faiths, icons, and rituals
toward the emergence of a hybridization born out of consequence rather than
intention.

Hoffecker-Mejia’s
work and exploration take colonization and dominion as a given and instead
focuses their attention on the processes of hybridization that take place as the
consequence of our colonized histories. Within this precarious moment in our
human timeline, where tensions are high between those who have benefited and
those who have lost from the reverberations of colonialism’s legacy,
Hoffecker-Mejia’s work frolics along, poking fun at certain platitudes that
have and continue to warn the dominant culture that given the opportunity, the
roles could reverse at any given moment. His retablo-like compositions allow
Hoffecker-Mejia to participate and control an exploration of the aforementioned
processes as a simulation of these consequential hybridizations. At a point in
our history when we are demanding the de-colonization of our institutions
and fiercely debating the follies of cultural appropriation, Hoffecker-Mejia’s
compositional strategies and material choices allow one artist access to a
process where power can be exchanged or neutralized between oppressors and
oppressed. It is only when these mechanisms are revealed that it may start to
become second nature to understand and act upon one’s own conditions.

What would your art biography look like
between the moment you knew you had an interest in art and art making to the
present day?

As far as the
biography ultimately, I am not sure much changes, hopefully with the exception
of some achievements, residencies, and opportunities. There are changes in my
approach to the work, as it constantly evolves, but those are more nuanced
modifications and shifts which are reflected in the statement, not the bio, I
suppose.

It sounds
cliché, but I have always had an interest in art. Growing up the only items
from Colombia, that I had access to, were woven art, wooden sculptures and
pieces of hand-made furniture. They were extremely important to me because they
were from the place of my birth, which as an adoptee, growing up in the US,
they were somehow imbued with a strange heavy power. So from the beginning, I
connected to visual art as a means of transmitting information of cultural
identity, while being painfully aware of the slippage and gaps, which
dislocation, and estrangement create.



What role does nostalgia play in the
conceptualizing and materializing of your work?

In fabricating
this space to compare/contrast and mediate cultural information, nostalgia
certainly plays an important role. My research looks at the visual culture of
indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a focus on pattern and banding. I pay
particular attention to Latin American woven wall hangings, mochila patterns,
and pre-Columbian work of the Muisca and Tolima peoples. I also look at the
reductive visual representations of indigeneity I see around me. There is a
persistent effort by dominant culture to commodify and sanitize an otherness,
which romanticizes, and/or negates histories. Examples abound in retail
clothing and home décor. I am partially focused on the strategies employed
which marginalize, such as caricature, conflation, and exotification.

Yet, the woven
items and wooden work, the physical items, I had access to, growing up, are
engrained upon me, and internalized in a way, in which research is not. They
continue to inform and infiltrate my work. This is strongly due to memory and
association. The items themselves display color palettes, and design elements
which encapsulate the era (as well as the area) in which they were crafted.
They are mostly from 60’s and 70’s, as these were my parent’s items. This was
also an era when a more globalized aesthetic was being embraced and appropriated
in America, as well, particularly by the counter culture.

The use of wood
as a reoccurring material resonates with this aspect of nostalgia, as
well.  Stained wood, evokes a design
aesthetic I grew up with. Wooden framing, also recalls personal experiences of
building and working with my father, often on Habitat for Humanity projects
which he was involved in. He has, and continues to work on the side as a
carpenter and contractor. So there is this desire to use a vernacular material,
or common material which is also really valuable to me. I am proficient in
welding and metal casting, but the bulk of my work is not concerned with high
art materials.

I associate
this use of lumber and found items, which is combined with sometimes naïve or
intuitive fashioning techniques, with ideas of auto-construction, or self-construction.
This references both the works’ physical construct, and its conceptual
structure. The idea of self-construction or identity construction is explored,
as well as creating a physical space, a ‘third space’, to investigate unequal
and uneven forces of cultural representation, and relational identity. As a post-colonial
examination of the intersections of cultures, third space allows for “new areas
of negotiation between meaning and representation”. I am attracted to many of
the ideas of third space theory, and how they address liminal space.

One of the
motivations to employ a modernist visual language comes from a place of deep
nostalgia as well. As a child I spent hours, daily, laying on the floor,
looking at, and listening to my Dad’s record collection. My father, a
university music professor, was an avid record collector. I was actually quite
obsessed with his Jazz records, less for the music at that stage, and more for
the visual art. Jazz albums from a certain period almost all featured modernist
paintings or sculptures on the cover, usually full cover, glossy, high
production images.

My interest in
modernist geometric abstraction placed in direct proximity to indigenous motif,
and facsimile, creates interesting parallels, and false equivalencies. Cut
color-aid paper gradation studies, from an assignment derived from a Josef
Alber’s Black mountain college color theory exercise, echo and dissolve into
the patterns of a Central American blanket, and their relationship exposes
their implied hierarchies, and power differentials. One being regarded as
study, and entrenched in academic visual research, and the other being seen as
an uneducated people’s art, or folk art. In many ways this sort of interplay is
happening all over the compositions, and it works to partially disintegrate
that air of sentimentality, or nostalgia. At the very least, the role of
nostalgia ends up being somewhat diminished in lieu of the larger conversation.



Could you elaborate on the “slippage and
gaps” against your proximity to your origin / place of birth? What is lost /
gained from this proximity?

There is an
obvious geographic gap, between the country I was raised in, and country of
birth, or origin, and there is also a resulting cultural estrangement. This
creates a positionality in which the imagery and symbols of dominant culture in
media, speak louder than any absent cultural information. In this situation an
individual is confronted with cultural information primarily through this
post-colonial gaze, or the eyes of the dominant culture. There is a similarity
here in what W.E.B. Dubois coined the concept of ‘double consciousness’, in
that one is very aware of the marginalization occurring, which undermines and
infiltrates one’s attempts to understand oneself. The ‘gap’ refers to this
dislocation, and to seeing from multiple perspectives. Though I  have spent a great deal of time in my life
researching materials from Indigenous cultures of the Americas, and for often
deeply personal reasons, I am not engaged in any sort of faithful recreation of
objects from an ancestral past, any more than I am involved in some sort of
direct memorialization.

  Through research alone I am very often
confronted with fragments of a story, aspects which can get at an
anthropological or ethonographic focus or truth, but not the lived in immersion,
in its historicity, and real world cultural connection, if that makes any
sense. The study of culture is a hollow substitute for being immersed in that
culture. I am conscious of the divide this estrangement has created, and the
work is engaged in the mediation of this distance. There are screens, blinds,
fences, barriers, multiple layers of information, patterns created from
scouring pads, and other components which allude to obstructed, whitewashed, or
marginalized histories. In this manner the work is entangled between the
personal, and larger social issues of identity, and representation.

Slippage occur
in the handling of these components. High art and low, the historical and
ahistorical, the found and the fabricated, caricature and the sincere, all
collide and collude. In the space created, the blurred points of contact,
resulting from this estrangement are explored. Here in this space I can
examine, the reconstruction of place and identity, myth and memory, the
hierarchies of representation, strategies of ‘othering’, and identity
construction and rearticulation.

What artists influence your work and how
does this influence manifest itself in the objects you create/compose?

An early strong
influence was the work of artist/theorist Joaquín Torres García. He expanded
the modernist dialogue to include Latin American and Indigenous sensibilities. His
ideas about a Universal Constructivism, although rather utopian were
nonetheless fascinating. The combination of European modernist geometry with
pictorial aspects inspired by indigenous cultures of the Americas, really
resonated with my exposure to visual culture, which was likewise a composite of
western European visual culture and Indigenous Latin American elements.

I also
appreciate Hélio Oiticica, whose work was a beautiful entanglement of formalist
aesthetic and issues of social transformation. Many of his pieces display a
dialogue between painting and sculpture, which I am also engaged in, and of
course the use of ‘anthropophagy’ or cultural cannibalism, the practice of
devouring and transforming thereby making something external, uniquely yours,
is a conceptual strategy I have had great interest in.

There are
really far too many artists who have left impressions upon me. I would be
negligent not to mention the artist collective, General Idea, who seemed to
further ‘weaponize’ modernism or subvert modernism as an agent of social
transformation.

The artist,
James Luna was and is a great inspiration. He put a post-colonial critique of
indigenous representation in contemporary culture front and center in his
practice, which never seemed heavy handed, thanks in part to his sense of
humor, and thoughtful approach. I am also influenced by Chicano artist, Richard
Lou. His work deals with power dynamics between marginalized peoples and
dominant culture.

    Brad Kahlhamer’s work and history speaks to
me. He is also dealing with cross cultural themes as well as ‘otherness’. He is
also adopted, so I appreciate how he has dealt with issues of authenticity and
indigenous identity. Jeffrey Gibson, Alejandro Guzmán, Rico Gatson, Jessica Stockholder,
Rachel Beach, Bill Walton, Hernán Ardila Delgado, Tomashi Jackson, Juan Pablo
Garza, Rachel Debuque, ASCO collective, Sarah Sze and Leonardo Drew are all
artists whose work I greatly respect.

What’s are some other origins of
influence in your work that may not be directly connected with what could be
generally viewed as “the art world?”

The origins of
the work are indebted to a certain digestion of indigenous art of the Americas,
but also from their conflated representations in mass culture. I am concerned
with cultural appropriation in retail stores such as, Urban Outfitters, Hobby
Lobby, Michaels, etc. The whole reductionist arrow and chevron motif is
something which is (often literally) placed in the work, and perhaps its
origins may not be readily apparent. There is often a push/pull between these

objects and their more sincere counterparts.



I also get a great deal of influence from researching critical race theory,
‘otherness’ studies and post-colonial studies. My work is concerned with a
nuanced look at the representation of otherness. I am involved in creating
these pluralist scenarios, in which disparate cultural information of the
Americas, the ‘authentic’ and the westernized facsimile are stacked up against
modernist language, and equivalencies and false equivalencies between them are
explored.

I’m influenced
by readings from authors such as Bell Hooks, Vine Deloria, and Philip
Deloria,  Lisa Marie Cacho, Gloria Anzaldúa
, Karen and Barbara Fields, Thomas McEvilley, and Homi K. Bhabha.

I also spent
considerable time, when I was younger, heavily immersed in graffiti culture and
I think that is an understated influence in composition and aesthetic.



Can you speak to the direction that your
work is going in now; specifically, the work that appears to open itself up to
a more immersive engagement with the work?



I am currently exploring the use of materials which can further illustrate and
elucidate the conversation I am trying to have. Materials which carry a strong
loaded meaning of erasure are being sought out and manipulated. As stated, I have
worked in the past with creating genericized faux indigenous patterns out of
cut scouring pads, in different colors and frosted them with white paint to
refer to the ‘whitewashing’, of histories. There are also woven cultural items
which are cut and fragmented throughout the work. Cut serape blankets, molas,
and other pieces or fragments of a whole, speak to dislocation and a cultural
and geographic discontinuity.



I am continuing to explore this slightly more literal use of materials. At the
moment I am sewing multiple dust mop heads together and the results become a distorted
mirror of Latin American wall weavings. This may be a departure from previous
work, to a certain extent, but with the current political climate it seems
appropriate to address the one dimensional portrayal of Latin American
immigrant’s primary value being their contribution the labor force. This sort
of narrative denies the multi-faceted ways in which Latin Americans have enriched,
and continue to enrich this country.



To the specifics of your question, I am interested in exploring the more immersive
qualities of the work which are emerging. Looking back at the work, it is clear
that the scale of the work has been growing. I am pursuing in the immediate
future, room sized installations. This changes the way the work is digested and
navigated. It can allow for the language of retail merchandising to perhaps merge
with didactic museum display. If this path is explored, I expect it to result
in a denser environment in which the viewer becomes enmeshed through
exploration. The resulting installation work could blur the line, and maybe
close the distance between the content and the viewer’s experience. The
object-ness of the pieces, in their present state, I feel, may reinforce or
further allow for a distance from the topic matter which separates the viewer,
and doesn’t involve them, or even implicate them in the way the work could if
it were more immersive and encompassing.



I am also attempting to make work to be placed outdoors. I had mentioned that graffiti
culture has been an unspoken influence in the work. It is there in the formal
structure of the work, but

I am interested in how it could affect the conceptual structure if the volume
is turned up a bit.

Graffiti is a subculture which is functioning as a reterritorialization of
space. In the context of settler colonialism, using this method to inject the
work into the public sphere, changes its tone drastically. It becomes renegade;
it can transform a banal safe space into one of critical investigation. It
becomes an unsanctioned reassertion, a reaffirmation.



Lastly, I hope to continue in the role of arts educator. It has been one of the
most enriching aspects of my graduate career. Working with students in
exploring their ideas, and building

the technical foundation to apply those ideas is incredibly rewarding. It
sounds trite, but I learn so much through teaching, and it keeps me actively
engaged in the field I enjoy and am passionate about.