In 2017, I was helping repair a wall at a gallery. After we had cut out a piece of drywall from the wall, we found a chunk of dried joint compound. I immediately thought of it as a recorded history of labor: drilling a hole and patching it in the same exact spot for close to six years. Later, I started to consider how this existed while the face of the wall was perfectly repaired.
Since then, I could not stop imagining what the other side of the walls in museums and galleries look like. I gained more experience in the basics of making walls and created early iterations and drawings of what I imagine is behind them. The irregular shapes of the drywall pieces in the sculptures are depictions of the shapes that I involuntarily create after I remove the access joint compound around the patched hole. The backside of this work is painted with collected paint from various exhibition spaces.
Left Behind #1-3, 2022 Wooden studs, joint compound, paint from the museum’s previous exhibition on drywall and French cleats 64.75” x 52” x 5”
“With these sculptures, Joseph Mora is concerned with subverting the identifications we ascribe and embody in liminal spaces. These liminal spaces, both physical and metaphorical, are where a transition takes place. As he draws on the experiences in his career — a gallery worker, an educator, and an artist — he reveals the processes of labor often invisible to most viewers to problematize our fixed notions of being.” - Marina M. Álvarez.
At the National Museum of Mexican Art, Giviing Shape: Yollocalli’s Artistic Practice Though The Years, Curated by Marina M. Álvarez.
