Celebrated Writer of the “Book of Life” Artist Takes Us to the Border!
Artbot Gallery at Marlowe Ink is pleased to present original paintings and prints by celebrated artist, animator, writer and director Jorge R. Gutierrez in his exhibit Border Banged. The show runds from August 24 – October 24, 2019. Attend the opening reception on Saturday, August 24, 6-9 PM Artbot Gallery at Marlowe Ink 1012 Madison Street, Alexandria Virginia 22314
Border Banged is a passionate love letter to the Tijuana and US border, reappropriating the bombardment of pop culture images that are sold to tourists and locals on both sides of the divide.
Gutierrez celebrates the border artisans who digest the influx of international popular culture and revels in reappropriating and reconfiguring images with subversive ideas masked with bold colors and text.
Raised in Tijuana, Gutierrez crossed the border to the US to attend elementary and middle school. Each day, he was dazzled and entranced by the alternative narratives to the cartoon characters and celebrity portraits that he saw when filtered through the context of a border that held neither culture at bay from the other.
Border Banged is a reflection of the artist’s childhood narrative with a lens on the border’s tense present. Using images from Skeletor to Scarface, from Mickey Mouse to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez he explores a love affair with Mexican pop and folk culture as filtered by the cultural behemoth to its North. The paintings in this exhibition grew out of the concept artwork Gutierrez created for his feature film “The Book of Life”, playing with tropes of cultural appropriation and the inevitable political overtones of bi-cultural kitsch at the border.
About Jorge… Jorge R. Gutierrez is a Mexican-born American animator, painter, writer, and director of Nickelodeon’s El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera and his feature film “The Book of Life”, nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film in 2014. He is currently working on “Maya And The Three” due in 2021 for Netflix Animation.
