The Thing Itself (2013)

Enrique Chagoya’s artwork never ceases to fascinate me. It mashes together pop art and religious iconography, segments of advertisements and peculiar, pithy slogans. Each piece is loaded with thematic content, almost overwhelmingly so, as it builds up its fragments to make some larger claim about the hot button issues of our time–colonialism, cultural imperialism, borders & migration. I recently learned that Chagoya is the Professor of Art at Stanford University. I wondering how specifically his background as an academic informs his work? His art feels much more scholarly and rigorous than pieces I’ve encountered from other artists this semester; his works read like journal articles, rich with bibliographic entries.