One’s eye usually skates proper over the record of supplies on the caption for an paintings, for the reason that verbiage used—“oil on canvas,” “ink on paper,” and the like—tends to be extra perfunctory than it’s partaking. However within the case of Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya’s sculptures of creatures in transformation, the phrases used to explain his many supplies can’t be ignored as a result of they’re so stylized and so weird.
Take the case of The Lil Rat That Made It on Board the Ship (2021), a sculpture that appeared at Artists House in New York this previous summer season. It’s an all-black assemblage that has an extended, gnarled tail extending from its physique and a sharp claw affixed to its head; it might not be misplaced within the Alien universe. Its supplies, as described by Montoya, are price quoting at size: “My very very giant black t-shirt that I smeared with pigmented dragon pores and skin silicone. Welding wire, black zip ties, black and inexperienced stitching string, rabbit pelt, horn ideas, half a horn, nail polish, soiled socks as a result of Timoh was washing his calzones and I couldn’t wait, emerald powdered pigment, automotive fender, black automotive half, possed bouncing ball.”
Who’s Timoh, and what did his boxers need to do with these soiled socks? What black cart half? Why did the artist smear his shirt with silicone, and the place does this garment even determine within the work, anyway? Quite than clarifying this “lil rat,” Montoya’s record of supplies solely provides one other layer of thriller—which, in fact, is the purpose.
Nahuales, chupacabras, shape-shifters, aliens, and different supernatural creatures determine readily in Montoya’s artwork, which is usually imbued with dense mythologies of his personal making. He is aware of his artwork might really feel international or odd to some. “I’m serious about mythology as a technique to clarify issues that perhaps can really feel uncomfortable to someone,” Montoya stated in a latest interview, talking by Zoom from his studio in Mexico Metropolis.
He was alluding to his true material: how folks outdoors the mainstream, and specifically folks alongside the U.S.‒Mexico border, are considered as undesirable beasts by those that abhor their very existence. However moderately than depicting outright the violence wrought upon migrants and even portraying these people themselves, Montoya makes use of fantastical beings as parallels for the lived realities of individuals in Mexico, the nation the place he was born, and Texas, the state the place he lengthy resided earlier than transferring again to his house nation.
Montoya approaches his artwork as a horror novelist would possibly. He’s been celebrated by critics and curators for concocting sprawling narratives involving competing life forces and intergalactic journey. Final 12 months he received Toby’s Prize, an award given by the Museum of Modern Artwork Cleveland, the place he now has a present that he says is in regards to the “explosion of a vampire that finally ends up changing into a spaceship itself.”
“The pores and skin shards begin to connect to components of the spaceship,” Montoya stated. “After which the vampire begins to suck the power out of what’s left of the spaceship. After which these little tentacles begin to develop into like extra tumors that may broaden and broaden, after which this begins to kind of create a cyborg, this kind of half-vampire, half-spaceship. And as time goes on and it’s touring into deep time, this spaceship then begins to mutate and create different beings that may assist it.”
These creatures are composed of wiring, used clothes, silicone, washer components, and a complete lot extra, and they’re, in accordance with Montoya, nonetheless awaiting a goal of their world. In that approach, he stated, they’ve queer overtones: They’re hybrids engaged within the messy means of discovering themselves. He referred to as his follow a type of “abject queer fecundity.”
Regardless of the darkish narrative undertones, Montoya’s artwork is usually beautiful, stated Lauren Leving, the curator of Montoya’s Cleveland exhibition. “The work is gorgeous, however it will probably generally be approached as abject or grotesque,” she stated. “The language of otherness is usually regarded as unfavorable, however right here it’s completely not. That’s so distinctive. He’s permitting us to consider potentialities for our lives—and for the long run.”
A self-described “desert hoe,” Montoya was born in 1989 within the Mexican metropolis of Parral. When he was two years outdated, he crossed the U.S.‒Mexico border together with his mom. In line with a textual content written by the artist, his father would finally comply with, joined by his cousin and chupacabras. “Standing by, ready for our flip to speak to the immigration agent’s interrogation, I considered what it might’ve been prefer to cross the border, not on land or water: however on my grandmother’s broom, below a battalion of stars and the candy odor of sacred datura,” Montoya wrote. “No paperwork or concern, simply the breeze under our ft. As an alternative that evening, crossing the bridge, we turned Coyotes; of each fantasy and actuality.”
Rigorously honed fictions turned a cornerstone of his life differently throughout his undergraduate years, when he studied Spanish literature at New Mexico State College in Las Cruces. Rising up, he stated, he witnessed a type of “heteronormative life that I didn’t actually belong to. Capitalism, the labor of a nine-to-five: I by no means actually felt like I slot in with that.” Finding out literature was the “best technique to have some type of creative inclination,” and horror and science-fiction books supplied worlds past this one.
Then, with one semester left till commencement, the artist rafa esparza reached out to Montoya, having been intrigued by the stylized nude photographs that Montoya had been taking of himself within the desert and posting to Instagram. With a undertaking within the works at Ballroom Marfa, an area in Marfa, Texas, about 4 hours from Las Cruces, esparza requested Montoya to assist out as an assistant. Montoya accepted and have become satisfied that sculpture was his true calling. Then he utilized to an MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth College and was accepted.
By the point he graduated, in 2020 on the top of the Covid pandemic, Montoya had already been working nomadically, scouring New Mexico, El Paso, and Juárez for supplies to make use of in his artwork. He recalled residing near the Rio Grande in El Paso and discovering objects solid off by development staff and migrants close to the river. As he picked by means of discarded water bottles and garments, he discovered himself “actually inquisitive about what [these materials] was, and who they belonged to,” he stated.
For some, that follow has located Montoya inside an extended lineage of Chicano artists who use discovered objects of their work—a textual content for his 2020 present at Sargent’s Daughters in New York, for instance, labeled his aesthetic rasquache, a reference to scholar Tomas Ybárra-Frausto’s time period for an inventive tendency predicated on hybridity and repurposed supplies. But others have argued that whereas which may be relevant to Montoya, he stands aside from practically all of his Latinx colleagues. In Artnet Information, Barbara Calderón praised Montoya as “certainly one of few difficult dominant tastes in Latinx artwork that favor representational, pop aesthetics, or express cultural motifs.
“Rasquachismo has a male-centered machismo, which is what Amalia Mesa-Bains was reacting to when she created domesticana, a woman-centered tackle it,” stated Susanna Temkin, a curator of La Trienal, El Museo del Barrio’s recurring survey of Latinx artwork, which this 12 months counts Montoya as a participant alongside well-known artists corresponding to Ser Serpas, Roberto Gil de Montes, and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess. “I feel we will see, in Ruben, a queer tackle it.”
Montoya acknowledged to me that his work could possibly be thought of a type of rasquachismo, however he stated that his artwork added “a literal appendage” to that time period, turning the idea corporeal. Along with his artwork, he desires to create what he calls “materials carriers”—to “make a physique so as to make one thing that feels prefer it’s alive.”
That comment feels like one thing that may be uttered by a horror film character—a Dr. Frankenstein with a social conscience, maybe. However Montoya stated he didn’t intend to encourage concern. He views his creations as responses to a type of “American life that may be very medical and really sanitized.” His sculptures are certain to face out, however we should always not cower within the face of them.
“I feel if persons are scared,” Montoya defined, “it’s as a result of they’ll see one thing within the work that’s reflective of them.”