Pete Hoffecker Mejía states: “This work is engaged with the negotiation of multiform cultural identities. I am expressly concerned with exploring the intersection of contrasting cultural information, hierarchies of representation, and conflation in the expression of otherness.
“Born in Bogotá, Colombia, of Indigenous ancestry, adopted by a multiracial family and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee (Cherokee Lands), I have created a studio practice that serves as a space for mediation of the resulting geographic and cultural estrangement. Cut and reassembled serape blankets, mochila pattern, molas, and other fragments of a whole speak to cultural and geographic discontinuity. Interrogating the themes of European geometric abstraction and Indigenous art forms allows me to create a sculptural narrative of contemporary Latin American and Indigenous cultural hybridity, with acknowledgment of the postcolonial landscape.
“High art and low, the historical and the ahistorical, the found and the fabricated, caricature and the sincere, all collide and collude. In this way, I explore the blurred points of contact resulting from estrangement, while touching on the obstacles in mediating self through distorted representations of the other in mass culture.”
from the exhibition text
Mondegreen by Pete Hoffecker Mejía is on view at Tri-Star Arts in Knoxville, Tennessee through September 25.
