Pablo Helguera, Committed Explanations in Geography

Pablo Helguera`s solo exhibition presents a timely selection of artworks produced between 2002 and 2009. Shown together for the first time, his projects highlight under-recognized historic and contemporary movements and communities embedded within the cultural landscape of the Americas. Helguera`s geographic scope is both far-reaching and specific, touching on the everyday life and heritage of places like Anchorage, Alaska; Puebla, Mexico; Tierra del Fuego, Argentina and Albany, New York, to name a few. Helguera`s historical, cultural, and geographic explorations materialize as an artistic form of cultural preservation that archives seemingly obscure ethnographic material, both real and re-imagined. A number of works in the exhibition — Chipilo (2008), Marie Smith Jones (2008), Conservatory of Dead Languages (2004 - the present) and Past and Future (2007) — address linguistic slips and losses taking place in North and South America. Other projects revisit the faith and traditions of the Shakers, John Pershing`s failed expedition through the Mexican Desert in 1916 in search of Pancho Villa, and the notion of Manifest Destiny, interpreted by Helguera as "history as a territory that is conquered and owned." The breadth of the subject matter and geography addressed within Committed Explanations in Geography serves to constructively complicate our understanding of American identity, past, present and future, at the start of a new era of politics in America.