October 2024 AIR: Joseph Josué Mora
Joseph explores the gestures of unseen labor of the artist and art worker
Joseph! I am so pumped to have you in the lab for your residency. I am curious about your work and excited to talk about it. Can you tell us more about social sculpture and your site specific installations?
Latitude! Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to work with y’all in the lab during my favorite month, not just because it’s my birthday, but it’s also the spookiest month of the year.
I see my sculptures and site specific installations an extension of my labor as a gallery worker and art preparator. Working as a full-time art handler within a large art institution, I consider the hidden labor that myself and other art preparators produce as research. Within my background as an undocumented/DACA artist, I also reflect and relate my artwork within the context of labor that many undocumented immigrants contribute to the US ecosystem, work that is greatly in the shadows and rarely recognized. Through the re-use of gallery paint, furniture, hardware and tools, I attempt to talk about the unseen labor between both communities in which I exist in, and the tension that each has against the bureaucratic systems they go against. I also utilize play and improvisation within my sculptures, often referencing everyday material and inverting it to bring about questions, sensories, and emotions for viewers.
How does location affect your work?
I’ve come to realize that location and space dictate a lot how I make my installations and sculptures. At Yes Project Space there is a very long wall that allowed me to create (Re)Define The Great Line. I used the length of the wall to embed blue painter’s tape with joint compound and paint, then I pleaded away the layers to reveal the process and labor. At Roots and Culture, with the help of Ahnali Tran and Milo Callahan Brown, I exhibited an iteration of this installation. The space forced the installation to have a different composition because of a semi-octagon nook and my decision to have the installation wrap around a corner of the wall. The second aspect of a location that affects my work is the people who manage the space. Without their permission, the work wouldn’t exist. As a gallery worker and art preparator, I understand why some people would have hesitations or need a proposal for site specific work. I am ultimately altering their walls, and recognize it’s laborious to repair it. This often leads to finding compromises that would best fit everyone’s capacity to exhibit the work.
You are taking photos with your phone of “mundane moments" and then archiving them in polaroid format. How do polaroids reflect the mundane for you?
In my work I am inspired by the gestural moments that are created while installing or traversing an exhibition or gallery space. From the mundane traces of nitrile blue gloves in a trash bin, an anchor hole that has not yet been repaired, or the forgotten pencil marks above an installed piece. All gestures that are either not seen by art viewers or are behind the scenes of an install. When I noticed the art handler's hand in such spaces, I often took photos of them using my iPhone. Through this documentation, I began growing a collection of photographic proof of labor that is often forgotten. The format and function of Polaroid photography became an outlet that was a way to communicate the rapid-ness of how these photographs were taken, the mundane it captured, but also served as a practice of archiving and documentation. The way these photographs are collected, then processed through Polaroid film, I think helps others understand by its tangibility, fleeeting-ness, and spontaneity that would otherwise be lost if not within the container that Polaroid film provides.
Recently, you have been exploring assemblages of tools, materials and photos. Can you talk about the work/life blur in your work?
Like many artists, work and life can often merge and grow in and out of each other. A reflection of that are my recent assemblages of found materials from my collection of tools and hardware. Lately I've been inspired by these materials that I formerly utilized for my day-to-day job or side gigs installing for a gallery or museum. Any other day these materials are seen as tools that I need in order to properly install an art piece or deinstall a whole exhibition. When I have moments of artist block, I tend to look at these materials, scouring through tool carts and tool bags, for objects that could have potential meaning. These compositions of ordinary objects are purely based on response where I tend to lean more into play and place no parameters on what I am allowed to arrange. It becomes experimental and fun, and I often channel a mentor of mine, Alberto Aguilar, who practices in a similar way. Through this method I reconsider what these objects mean now placed in a different manner-- taped up, clamped into, cradled in foam. Through observing the process and the gestures the tools perform in the sculptures, I have come to realize these works serve as a form to analyze emotional wellness that becomes overwhelmed by the pressures of gallery work, as well as structures of immigration and conditions that immigrants live with everyday.
How does job and identity play a part in your work, as often the art handling world is cis-white males?
Existing and working as an undocumented person in the United States is difficult, not only within the context of my practice, but for many other undocumented people who contribute to the work economy through laborious jobs that are often dismissed. My identity within my work talks about the labor that I've experienced as a gallery worker. The reality of being an art preparator is that it is an occupation that is often not sustainable due to its low wages, irregular seasons for hire, not accessible to learn the practices, and are not fully recognized by institutions or galleries compared to other museum jobs such as curators and registrars. In conjunction with this, the art handling world often prioritizes cis-white males. Women and BIPOC workers do not take up as much space as their white counterparts. The socio-political context of this work are fractals. I consider myself an undocumented art handler who is navigating this environment and making work about it. I also consider the laborious jobs that many immigrants take up as well.
Joseph Josué Mora
Joseph Josué Mora has exhibited in the Chicago Latinx Art Now Biennial (2016), National Museum of Mexican Art (2018 and 2023), and debuted a series of new and ongoing work in a solo show titled Clearance at the Chicago Art Department (2019). Mora co-organizes Undocumented Projects since 2017. He was selected as one of the eight Breakout Artists of 2022 in Newcity Chicago Magazine and at the Chicago Artists Coalition. In May 2022, Mora created a temporary graphite mural titled Needed, But Not Wanted (In Masses), through Mind Map, a bi-monthly program at MANA Contemporary Chicago. Mora was selected as an artist for the Center Program 10, 2023, at the Hyde Park Art Center, where he also exhibited between December 2023-February 2024. Mora’s artwork can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Mexican Art and the Illinois State Museum in Springfield.
In addition to Mora’s studio practice, he also has experience in gallery work as an art preparator and most recently as the Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Staff Advisor for SITE Galleries and INCUBATOR at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he holds a bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from.