Cabeza de Baca’s immersive installation explores the fluidity of movement.
The title for Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s solo exhibition takes its inspiration from David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. A theme in the 2004 sci fi narrative is kindness over greed, selflessness over violence and humanity over betrayal. Mitchell considers how humans normalize brutality, while he also persists against “an ocean” of pessimism.
Cabeza de Baca, born on the border of the US Mexico border to Mexican and Native American parents, has from a young age felt the brunt of imperial dispossession. Whether it’s through figurative or abstract painting and sculpture this hybrid art practice complicates linear colonial memory in order to envision grander pools of perception.