I began work with a series of paintings on watercolor paper with tar, sand and asphalt, and later on with layered drywall sheets, in a bas relief style. The work came as a result of constant experimentation, a reliance on construction materials, and an expressionist compositional origin. With themes of labor, craft authorship, and environmental issues, I leaned into finding new materials to create.
In 2019, I displayed my first iteration of the piece titled I Tried to Weave a Story too Intimate, a rope made to run through a series of pegs on the wall, created after I tore an Astros t-shirt into strips of fabric to tie together. The shirt was given to me by my mother after the family who she has worked for over twenty years as a housekeeper and nanny gave it to her as a hand me down. The line that the rope makes through the pegs is the bus route she would ride on from our first apartment in the United States to their first house. In time, my practice moved to focus on the use of fibers. Using self-built peg boards, I weave expressionist and now figurative compositions with various spools of wool yarn, layering up constantly until I could no longer use the pegs.
The diptych presented in this exhibition is an attempt to weave various historical, personal and social contexts in between the imagery used which comes from a photograph I took in Houston.
Marcos Hernandez Chávez, born in Mexico, is a Houston raised artist based in the north/east side of Houston. He has a BFA from the University of North Texas (Denton). Chávez’s work has been presented at the Galveston Arts Center, the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, including spaces in Colorado, California, and New York.
