Events

In his newest body of photographs, Las Cruces-based artist Marcus Xavier Chormicle looks closely at the legacies of masculinity within his family. Tracing the lives of family members he has lost, he considers the intergenerational impact of loss and memory. At the heart of the exhibition, an installation titled My Uncle’s Baptism portrays his uncle in a swimming pool, lifted into the air as he leaps into the water; the series is the last portrait Chormicle made of his uncle before he passed away prematurely. Other photographs mark personal landscapes, domestic interiors, and reflections on violence: My Grandfather’s Blood and Their Mark on our Skin tell the story of police shootings that Chormicle witnessed. Other landscapes bear the traces of military histories: Our Scar on the Land, for example, documents the architecture of Fort Selden, New Mexico, a US military outpost where White and Black soldiers were stationed to kill Apache Native Americans. “This image,” Chormicle writes, “challenges New Mexican myths of a harmonious multicultural melting pot and rather highlights the brutal and violent history, specifically the genocide carried out against Indigenous people in the area by the US government and the systemic erasure of those horrific histories within the region.” Within his work, Chormicle brings together these national and regional histories with the evidence of their devastating impacts and legacies on his own family. The result is a meditative, sometimes startling, reflection on grief and the lived experience of our entangled histories.