2024
Looking Beneath Our Feet
Oscar Formacio
Curated by Christian Gómez
“You must open the eyes of your fingers and embark on your own journey
through sensitivity… your feet are feeling and contributing,
then your hands, and finally your eyes.”
Elvira Espejo, The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts
Oscar Formacio’s work takes as its starting point, both narratively and materially, the place from which he comes: San Andrés Cholula, Puebla, a community of Indigenous origin where the colonial incursion is particularly evident, yet where pottery shards can still be found by scratching or turning over the earth. In narrative terms, his practice draws on microhistory, a historiographical approach that examines particular cases to understand broader historical and social processes. In his engagement with materials, meanwhile, he allows himself to investigate their political dimensions, intuit their historical weight, and, above all, explore their formal and sensory possibilities.
This exhibition at Ache Galería weaves together the artist’s ongoing concerns, as he carries his questions, methods, and persistent inquiries into other grounds and landscapes. The body of work, encompassing both ongoing projects and others developed over several years, takes on new resonances when situated in this territory—a borderland between regions, a crossroads whose history is shaped, beyond any labels or definitions, by what lies beneath the earth.
These works, born of a powerful pictorial, sculptural, and installation-based sensibility, constitute something that reaches further still: a conversation with the memory of the territory, whose temporality extends beyond the gaze through which we have framed it as landscape. They are narrative threads emerging from walls, revealing that these, too, are stone and earth, inhabited and traversed by those who came before us; a collection of memories, traces of other times, and fissures that bear witness to their passage and to the workings of materials, as well as traces left by the body upon its surroundings, soon to disappear. With an awareness of our own corporeality upon this dust, we encounter images that escape, if only slightly, the fleeting nature of existence. The artist moves across different soils, shaping them and discovering forms within them, yet his gestures remain provisional within an infinite cycle. In his practice, the entire body participates in the realm of sensibility, not to tame the earth, but to temporarily distill its forms and enter into dialogue with the memories it holds. Looking Beneath Our Feet is his invitation to take part in this journey through the sensory.
Christian Gómez
NeuGeburt
The Ash-Laden Sprout
Rebecca Uliczka
In the age of fire, this series turns its gaze toward the moment after the flames: when, among charred trees and blackened soil, nature begins to regenerate from the memory held within its roots.
The horse, a symbol of strength, and the human figure bear witness to this metamorphosis: an analogy between vegetal resilience and human remembrance, and the capacity to be reborn after adversity.
The root moves forward through the darkness, pushing and breaking through without asking permission. The sprout that emerges from the ashes is not a fragile gesture, but an act of resistance: a silent cry of life in the face of destruction.
From the Jungle to the Moon
Mauricio Palos
Mauricio Palos (SLP, 1981) presents a collection of interwoven narratives—visual testimonies that reveal the influence of the United States on territories, bodies, and belief systems, from the Moon to the rainforest, from the desert to the nopal fields.
The journey begins in 2020, the pandemic year in which Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. Even then, the unraveling of dominant narratives was already becoming apparent, along with the growing difficulty of distinguishing truth from fiction and the rise of algorithmic manipulation as a new tactic of warfare. These strategies are, however, all too familiar in Latin America, where foreign intervention has spent decades reshaping and rewriting local histories.
During those years, Palos traveled through territories deeply marked by the Cold War, including Panama and Colombia. He visited the former School of the Americas, now converted into a Meliá hotel, as well as communities in Mexico and the Amazon where evangelical Christianity has displaced Indigenous belief systems. With it came the narrative of the heroic savior—a symbol that persists both in the rainforest and on the Moon—and an ideology that buries the beliefs of the peoples it encounters, converting them to a vision of progress and a future projected onto celestial bodies.
Today, during Trump’s second term, this context has intensified. Discourses of expansionism, exploitation, and dispossession are no longer concealed. They openly seek to impose a form of hegemony justified through biblical narratives, in which machines are placed at the service of power, nature is reduced to a resource, and people become bodies available for exploitation.
And yet, narratives are never singular. Stories intertwine with local realities, take on new meanings, and emerge transformed as they adapt to each territory. Plants grow through theaters in the middle of the rainforest. Dreams of reaching outer space endure among the nopal fields. The idea of a single narrative dissolves into the water and clay—green, red, white—a millennia-old material that has allowed countless other stories to be stitched together and has sustained us through them.
Vessels have been broken, and new ones have been made. Through syncretism, visions have emerged that seek reconciliation with their ecosystems through reciprocal and generous relationships—relationships that sow the possibility of a future in which the land endures and continues to sustain connections among humans, flora, and fauna.
As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, perhaps the story was never truly about the bravery of the hero who wielded the spear, but rather about the bag that carried the seeds, the roots, and the food that made life possible.
Territory Is An Act
Ana Gómez | Casey Whittier | Jarrett Mellenbruch
Here “territory” does not mean land claimed or held. It means a place brought into being through an act: the act of marking it, working it, and making its materials speak. A territory in this sense is something closer to a song than a border. It comes from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, who described how a place becomes a territory the moment its raw matter starts to carry expression, the way a bird’s call turns a patch of forest into a home.
Ana Gómez, Casey Whittier y Jarrett Mellenbruch do something similar with San Miguel de Allende. They gather its clay, its tile, its wool, and its light, and they let that material become expressive. Unlike a map of the region or a claim upon it, this territory asserts that ground is something we make, together, by the care we bring to it.
When time carves a canyon,, the cut reveals what the earth holds: strata of varying density and time that form a single substrate. This exhibition functions like that cut. Ana Gómez, Casey Whittier, and Jarrett Mellenbruch approach San Miguel de Allende as accumulated matter and history. Each artist exposes a different layer, and together they reveal the depth of a place.
The material with which Ana Gómez works is landscape in itself. She constructs her compositions from clay extracted from the surrounding hills and tiles salvaged from local workshops. Each piece is made from the very substance of the land and transformed into a new sculptural landscape that engages with both the geological nature of the place and the centuries-old pottery tradition that has emerged there.
Casey Whittier's research is of a particularly embodied kind - she uses her senses to create a more forensic understanding of place. Her visual observation of details ranging from a leaf’s delicate structure to the patterns created by cobble stones combine with the feel of the day’s collection of special rocks in her pocket and the terrain undulations mapped during morning runs. Her works combine handmade ceramic beads, and wool dyed using local plants to form a subtle cartography rooted in her sensitivity to the intricacies of place.
The layer in which human intervention is most evident belongs to Jarrett Mellenbruch. His series of medium-format black and white photographs, Wandering: Red, Yellow and Blue, is a meditation on natural landscapes, built environments, and the people who inhabit them. Monolithic geometric shapes in primary colors activate and obscure the framed images and appear on a set of hand-modeled ceramic cups awaiting use by visitors to the exhibition. When the cups circulate between the gallery and the adjacent café, the human interaction triggers two exchanges: one social, among the visitors, and one material, between the Bajío region and the clay’s origin in the American Midwest.
What unites these practices is a shared sense of tension that place holds in the work. Each artist operates at a different remove from the ground, and each reveals the depth that comes from being sensitive to their environment.
ANTES DE QUE SE ME OLVIDE :
MÁQUINAS Y FABULACIONES
Sometimes, when we try to remember, the first thing that appears is not a clear image, but a confused sensation: a fragment, a color, a texture. Something that feels close, yet never fully takes shape.
To remember is not to return to the past. It is to construct it once again.
In this exhibition, the artist does not attempt to represent memories, but rather to approach the very mechanism of remembering. That unstable moment in which memory has not yet become an image, and yet has already begun to transform.
His project is a pictorial investigation into fabulation and confabulation, understood as a vital impulse to construct, sustain, and reinterpret one’s own reality. In his attempts to build living memories, the fear of forgetting also emerges: the fear that what has been lived may dissolve until it becomes unrecognizable.
The works are divided into two bodies.
In Machines, the artist uses objects, materials, assemblages, and structures as devices that seek to give form to the intangible. These pieces do not represent scenes or characters; they function as attempts to show what memory looks like before it becomes a recollection: when it is still weight, residue, fragment, and accumulation.
In Fabulations, memory has already found a form, though not necessarily a faithful one. Drawing from photographs from the family archive, domestic stimuli, and personal references, the artist constructs pictorial compositions and collages in which remembering blends with imagining, completing, and altering. Here, memory is contaminated by affection, desire, and interpretation.
Over time, the artist has come to understand that fabulating is also an act of self-love: a way of transforming the fragility of memory into an oneiric territory where he can dwell with greater peace. Most of these inventions are born as impulses that later translate naturally into images, almost always blurred, appearing first in his notebooks and later in his paintings.
The project moves between involuntary confabulation — that invention that emerges when the mind fills in the gaps — and conscious fabulation, showing how an emotionally true fiction can become the most functional version of reality.
These works do not seek to show what was, but rather to reveal the artist’s persistent effort not to forget, even knowing that each memory, upon returning, is already something else.
