Botanica Poetica: Hector Mendoza & “White Wilderness”

On Friday, September 25, we open a new exhibition in our Project Space Gallery: Botanica Poetica , which showcases new work by Lucas Artist Fellows inspired by the varied and diverse plant life found in Montalvo Arts Center’s 175-acre public park.

Among the featured artists is Mexico-born Hector Dionicio Mendoza, currently based in Monterey, California. Mendoza’s mixed media practice, which includes sculpture and two-dimensional works, often combining the organic and the man-made and exploring a wide range of themes, including the everyday potentiality of catastrophe.

In this short video created by filmmakers Alexis Costanza and Pierce Leggin, Mendoza gives us a unique view into his working process as he describes how he created a new series of works on paper for Botanica Poetica, White Wilderness, while he was an Artist Fellow at the Lucas Artists Residency Program.

Mendoza begins his process by exploring Montalvo ’ s grounds and gathering plant specimens. Returning to his studio, he carefully preserves his flora samples by drying and pressing them between the leaves of heavy books. Later, he meticulously arranges them on white paper.

As is true for many of the artists whose work is featured in Botanica Poetica , Mendoza ’ s creative approach recalls some of the standard methods used in botanical research. He mimics and appropriates the methodology of the herbarium – a collection of preserved plant specimens typically found in universities, natural history museums, and botanical gardens. Essential for the study of plant taxonomy, h erbarium specimens are usually dried and pressed plants affixed to a sheet of cartridge or other archival quality paper, with information indicating provenance and identity.

There is something beautiful but at the same time disturbing about Mendoza’s ghostly, haunting images. Discussing the Wild Wilderness series, he states, “ I like the line between beauty and a warning. There is a kind of darkness about [these works] that I like. ” If a herbarium is a collection of dead plants, these works seem to depict a dying landscape. Mendoza ’ s blanched foliage recalls the parched terrain visible all around us and registers the catastrophic impact of California ’ s ongoing drought and growing concerns about the devastating effects of global climate change on the earth ’ s living systems.

In many of these new works the artist has painstakingly traced the delicate silk threads of a spider ’ s web. In the early 19th century, as a counter-narrative to the prevailing drive to classify the world into ever-smaller taxonomic units, Prussian naturalist explorer Alexander von Humboltz (1769-1859) proposed the radical notion–at least in a European context– that nature was a great living organism, an interconnected whole, like a web. While this holistic view of our planet and its natural systems has been part of the world view of many First Nations peoples like Native Americas for generations, it was British chemist James Lovelock who developed the first scientific theory of Earth as a self-regulating complex living system in the early 1970s. He called his theory the Gaia Hypothesis. Is the interconnectedness of nature what Mendoza wants us to consider with his spider ’ s web?

All spiders are predatory and nearly all are venomous. Most weave a deadly trap in the form of a web. Despite its great beauty, for Mendoza the backcountry is also a space of potential threat and danger. In the tradition of John Muir and Henry David Theroux, descriptions of ‘ wilderness ’ often take the form of ahistorical pastoral fantasies coded as ‘ white, ’ and often overlook the complex historical relationships between wilderness and people of color. As an example, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the spread of lynching in the 20th century transformed the forest wilderness into a fearful place for many African Americans. In Mendoza’s White Wilderness No. 5 , beyond the spider’s web are the shadowy shapes of two tires. In recent years, the Mexican countryside has become the backdrop for drug-related kidnapping and murder, mass graves, and ultraviolence, including necklacing–the appalling method of killing a victim by putting a petrol-filled tire around his or her neck and setting it on fire.

The tires on view in White Wilderness No. 5 also recall the urban Mexican American experience of car customization and Lowriding. They are out of place in this wilderness setting–a reference to the lack of minorities in America’s national parks, where visitors continue to be predominately non-Hispanic Caucasians.

In Mendoza’s series of new works, the artist depicts ‘wilderness’ as a contested territory over which competing placas or narrative tags have been inscribed. These narratives, even within the environmental movement itself, frequently fail to acknowledge ways in which landscape is always a racially coded space.

ARTICLE BY DONNA CONWELL