La Metro Loteria (La Brea) and Bristol Food Court Loteria (Santa Ana)
Jose Lozano
Medium: Muralism and Painting (2012-ongoing)
Issues: Barrio Technology, Cultural Hacking, Decolonizing conceptualizations of "Cyber Space", Decolonizing Space/Place, Inteligencia Arte-oficial, and Rasquachismo
Project Links
Description
The works of Jose Lozano are deeply decolonial and immensely technological and disruptive to the impositions of Anglo culture in the region of Southern California. With his interventions in public spaces in the form of gigantic murals and videos in loop of his artwork he enriches and hacks into an Anglo-dominated society through the proposal of an Other cyberspace of art-official intelligence, un espacio cibernético Otro de inteligencia arte-oficial, (because some of these projects are supported by local institutions too) those that lead by the same organizations and formulations that the pieces seek to dismantle. In other instances, for example at the Bristol Food Mart the lotería was supported by Sarah Rafael García founder of LibroMobile and someone who is dedicated to bringing Latino culture to the forefront. The mural features things one finds inside the place. It reflects the customers and they have reacted very enthusiastically. For the settler colonial mind, this complex navigation between spaces may be news or a new frontier, part of an unknown dimension, a matrix of Chicanismo which they have lived with, but which they have shamefully ignored for so many years. It depends on how you see it. How some may see it could be highly influenced by levels or dimensions of coloniality. Regardless, there are other forms of making and producing a digital technology that is beyond the limited definitions of the digital, where here we see a chispa o energía de nuestra raza, de electronic technology generating, storing, and processing data beyond the two states of positive (1) and non-positive (0).
Lozano’s art is explicitly dedicated to the shapes of Brown bodies which are usually stereotyped as “ugly” or “coarse” in racist mass media representations imbued in coloniality. The subjects are an imposition of beauty and magnificence standing above the public in a colorful cultural hack, gesturing quotidian cultural acts running parallel to the quotidian experience of the passers-by. Depictions include everyday objects or icons that may seem a mystery to those who are not so savvy of the cultural knowledge repositories of our barrios, or of the sensibilities of rasquachismo, and the rituals and curation of both public and domestic settings. Yet, they clearly speak to those that do. These acts are not seen as technological and yet, they run parallel to the acts of back end engineering, hacking, and the careful design of UI and UIX design. These actions and the actants are invisible to the naked settler eye. Lozano’s interventions of public spaces are making public the private, turning individualistic experiences into communal ones and basically hacking a system that has been privatizing spaces that are public, as has happened with western digital cyberspace. Lozano is ultimately asking Anglo culture to see itself through Brown eyes and find their humanity within that vision.
Bio
Jose Lozano is a multimedia, Chicano Border artist for over 40 years. He was born in LA and grew up in the border between Ciudad Juarez and Del Paso. He has exhibited in numerous art galleries, curated shows, written children’s books, painted murals in public art around Los Angeles, has lead community centered art projects with communities in South Central, Highland Park, and Lincoln Heights. His work is included in the LACMA collection and is a recipient of the Getty Grant for established Artists.