Wick Alexander-Taco

La Luz de Jesus Gallery is pleased to present Taco Trucks at Every Corner, a solo exhibition by Wick Alexander on view from December 6 – 29, 2019.

In 2016, Marco Gutierrez, who was speaking on behalf of presidential candidate (at the time) Donald Trump, appeared live on MSNBC stating that rampant undocumented immigration into the U.S. from Mexico could lead to “taco trucks on every corner.” As a politically-minded San Diego native who resides just miles from the U.S./Mexico border, Wick Alexander was long familiar with this sentiment of ignorant American fear – and it is this fear which sparked the fire for his show. Shining a biting satirical spotlight on Gutierrez’s primitive words, Alexander took found paintings of iconic American landmarks and landscapes and inserted taco trucks into their compositions. The symbol of the taco truck is not only a tongue-in-cheek critique of Trump’s xenophobic politics, however. Rendering the taco trucks to match the style of each found landscape painting, Alexander naturalizes the trucks into the fabric of American history, challenging the exclusionary policies of our contemporary Trump reality and wittily pushing back against the whitewashing of American history. His use of found paintings and photographs, all collected from thrift shops and swap meets, subtly draws a parallel between the found objects themselves and the immigrants his work centers around – both marginalized, outcast, and rendered invisible in their vast and hostile environments.

Since 1980, San Diego native Wick Alexander has been producing distinctive paintings, sculptures and public artworks. Awards for his paintings have been presented by the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council and the Ford Foundation. His paintings are included in many private collections and museum permanent collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the California Center for the Arts in Escondido and
the Banff Center of the Arts in Alberta, Canada. Alexander has shown his work at the California Center for the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the CECUT in Tijuana, and most recently, at the San Diego History Center and the Oceanside Museum.

Contact Gallery Director Matthew Gardocki for purchase info:

info@laluzdejesus.com  (323)666-7667