Jesus Vasquez

COMEDY OF MENACE are thrilled to announce Jesus Vasquez’s “Somewhere
between 1979 and 2033 in South Brooklyn, at the edge of Sunset Park and Park
Slope, all the Courtyard Saints found and lost their Block in one lifetime.” at Broncko Bianchi, London.

The titular installation is a hyperpoliticised recreation of the green walls that usually
surround New York construction sites. Here, Vasquez interrogates the otherwise
minor gestures – wanted posters, graffiti, construction permits – that line these walls, turning New York itself into a stage and battleground for local, national and global politics. More specifically, a reappropriation of the political ephemera that perfumes the city during its perpetual cycles of public debate and crisis. Who makes them? What are they trying to tell you? What are you really being sold? Where and how does every individual fit in this cacophony of voices and ideas? In this fictional construction site, its archetypal materials are “spoofed” to elevate that chaos of opinion with a texture and physicality that feels distinctly New York.

Many of the reappropriated materials point towards the silent, violent displacement of longtime residents of the city who, over the course of decades of divested state
funding from public welfare, poverty policing, and a perpetually unliveable economy, have been forced to move. Here, buzzwords such as “gentrification” are less of an abstract concept and more an ongoing force shaping real people’s real lives. The installation presents the NYPD as an overfunded military oppression force that continues to treat New Yorkers as unneeded, unwanted, and untrusted.

Moreover, it counterbalances established narratives of political oppression by honouring generations of migrant working-class New Yorkers through personal archive images and a large-scale graffiti mural of Vasquez’s Colombian immigrant family painted by Ramone “K” Anderson. It is a barricade, an (auto-)ethnographic study, a memoir, a poetry collection, a library and a shrine. Curated by COMEDY OF MENACE, the exhibition opens with a Private View on the 1st of August, and runs from the 2nd to the 20th of August.