“Just Being”
Secret Identities, Ghost Stories, and Pirate Dreams
Solo Show by Xavier Lopez Jr.
Opens:
First Thursday October 3, 5pm – 9pm
Performance and Artist Talk:
Saturday, October 12, 1pm – 3pm
Exhibition runs October 3 – November 2, 2024
Just Being:
Secret Identities, Ghost Stories,
and Pirate Dreams
Over the course of a thirty-plus year career, Xavier Lopez, Jr. has come to be known for his own brand of lush, conceptual sculpture, especially his “sheet ghost” installations, flower Rorschachs, tin foil mountains and performance art. Intersectional to his core, Lopez combines identities (Latinx, nonbinary, and many more) in a wide- ranging practice that varies from performance to mixed-media sculpture and painting. In Just Being, his first solo exhibition at Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), Lopez explores a body of new work featuring installations and video, with wall-mounted 2D and 3D work that incorporates motion and audio. Mundane materials are chosen to represent the artist’s own youth as part of an investigation into themes of love and death, identity and culture. Lopez’s work confronts the expectations that mainstream art criticism might place on artists of color; Just Being resists conforming to cultural expectations and instead celebrates its own beautiful, awkward strangeness.
After BA and MFA art degrees from University of Nevada Reno and University of California Davis, Lopez taught in Europe for several years before returning to the west coast, eventually settling in Seattle, where he became an arts writer for the Seattle Post Intelligencer. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions on both American coasts as well as in Germany, England and France. His sculpture and paintings are part of several private and public collections, including those of Lynn Herschman-Leeson, David S. Goyer, Geoff Johns, Robert Morrison, Michael Sarich, the UC Davis Art Graduate Collection, University Nevada Reno, Jot Travis Collection and others. Lopez currently directs the country’s only Latinx Performance Festival in Seattle and writes for Public Display Art.
Xavier Lopez Jr.:
Lopez’s work transcends easy categorization and reflects influences from modern and postmodern art history and, perhaps more deeply, Latinx culture as expressed outside the stereotypes of Day of the Dead. As much as he identifies as a Latinx artist, Lopez also wants to escape the limited versions that mainstream society has created for a “Latinx artist.” The Eurocentric expectation that an artist of color use their cultural heritage as a direct resource (for example) is wonderfully subverted, even as echoes of the Catholic tradition almost glimmer here and there in both material and performance, as Lopez presents objects as if they were once part of a lost ceremonial practice. In Just Being, Lopez shows why he is a pioneer of contemporary art’s current obsession with identity, time, and autonomy.
Recalling an earlier, formative period, Lopez writes, "White galleries were afraid to show anything by a Chicano-American artist, whose work dared to make work that came from their own biography--that spoke of their own experiences, dreams and dared say their own name, their first name rather than just their last. It was a thing that continues to this very day and so I tended to show in spaces that were university based, city-based, non- commercial." Please join CoCA in celebrating the work.