In 2017 I was helping repair a wall at a gallery. After we cut out a piece of drywall from the wall, we found a chunk of dried joint compound. I immediately thought of it as recorded history of labor: drilling a hole and patching it in the same exact spot for close to six years. Later I started to consider how this existed while the face of the wall was perfectly repaired. To me this is the equivalent to how immigrant labor and undocumented people are ignored in the United States by its policies. Since then I could not stop imagining what the other side of the walls in museums and galleries look like. I gained more experience on the basics of making walls, and created early iterations and drawings of what I imagine is behind them. The irregular shapes of the drywall pieces in the sculptures are depictions of the shapes that I involuntary create after I remove access joint compound around the patched hole. The backside of this work is painted with collected paint from various exhibition spaces.
Left Behind #1-3, 2022 Wooden studs, joint compound, paint from the museum’s previous exhibition on drywall and French cleats 64.75” x 52” x 5”
“With these sculptures, Joseph Mora is concerned with subverting the identifications we ascribe and embody in liminal spaces. These liminal spaces, both physical and metaphorical, are where a transition takes place. As he draws on the experiences in his career — a gallery worker, an educator, and an artist — he reveals the processes of labor often invisible to most viewers to problematize our fixed notions of being.” - Marina M. Álvarez.
At the National Museum of Mexican Art, Giviing Shape: Yollocalli’s Artistic Practice Though The Years, Curated by Marina M. Álvarez.
