Oscar Magallanes

Magallanes’ works relate to codex, texts, and artworks from the colonial period in Mexico. These codices served, in their original usage, as historical documents and mnemonic devices that would allow the viewer to not only recall their own histories and mythologies but to create and interpret their world view. During the colonial period, the tlacuilohqueh, under the guidance of the European friars, produced codices that documented the Nahuatl’s cultural practices. These codices became a hybrid of traditional pictographs with Roman alphanumeric annotations added to allow the European friars to interpret the codex. This was done with the aim of essentializing the Nahuatl culture, allowing the friars to subvert and convert the Nahuatl. As José Rabasa has written in “Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You,” what confronted the friars on the pages of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis was an essentialization--not only of the Nahuatl culture but also of the friars themselves. They were confronted by the tlacuilohqueh’ ability to inhabit a plurality of existences, thus mitigating the Eurocentric worldview.

While there are five hundred years between the production of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis and now, Magallanes intends the works on display in this exhibition to act in common with the codex.

The works are made with the idea that the artist is a current-day tlacuilo, a figure that creates and interprets the documentation of an unbroken chain of parallel and recurring events that have led to the current pluralities that have created schisms in American society. The artist, like the tlacuilo, recognizes the effects of essentializing iconography.

The work draws upon cultural and popular iconography, along with pre-colonial to contemporary barrio and Chicano signifiers, which serve to simultaneously delineate and demarcate through visual vocabularies. This is reflected in the work’s use of iconography that cannot through a western lens be entirely or even at times partially understood in regard to the original meaning. While the entirety of the images are at first glance seemingly disparate, every image is carefully researched and every line in the work designed with a specific intent: there is much that can be read into the connections that are made by the individual viewer.