Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, installation, video, music
Website: gallerywendinorris.com
Julio César Morales was born in 1966 in Tijuana, Mexico, and has spent most of his career in San Francisco, where he studied New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute. After more than a decade working as a senior curator and museum director in Arizona, he has recently returned full-time to San Francisco and his art practice. He is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA New York, LACMA, and the KADIST Foundation. He has also worked extensively as a curator, with highlights including solo exhibitions with Superflex, Suzanne Lacy, Mary Kelly, and the Bay Area Now triennial at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Morales works across painting, watercolor, video, installation, neon, and sound to explore migration, labor, underground economies, and the porous border between the United States and Mexico. His best-known series, Undocumented Interventions, presents meticulous watercolor diagrams of means of human trafficking in passenger vehicles — rendered with the detached precision of architectural drawings — and strips its subject of moral judgment, focusing instead on tactics of survival in a liminal world where there is no right or wrong. His practice operates by whatever means necessary: in different projects he has employed the DJ turntable, neon signs, the historical reenactment of a famous meal, and the conventions of an artist-run gallery to explore social interaction and political perspective. His most recent work centers on the interdependence of the United States and Mexico through sound installation and the Gemelos (“twins”) watercolor series, depicting the intertwined figures of people crossing borders in intimate, suffocating proximity.
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