Curated by Evan J. Garza

About William Cordova: This One’s 4U:

For his first solo exhibition in Boston, William Cordova (b. 1971, Lima, Peru) brings together new and recent works in sculpture, installation, video and works on paper by the Miami/New York-based artist, unmasking and remixing seemingly disparate and repressed histories through thoughtful and subtle juxtapositions of familiar detritus.

The Peruvian-born artist’s work imbues displaced historical narratives with new meaning, conflating previous events with contemporary context and creating rich monuments to individuals, events, and cultural and ritual signifiers. His materials reflect the temporality of the subjects themselves, using discarded pages from books, reclaimed wood and stones, newsprint, found footage and salvaged cars to conjure intimate connections between far-reaching chronological points.

“William Cordova’s practice is inextricably linked with concepts of disparity, interpretation, transformation, and re-contextualization,” says curator, Evan J. Garza. “His works create arbitrary and ephemeral juxtapositions of historical narratives and cultural iconographies that reconstruct sites, events, and understandings, and which conjure freshly rendered contexts for people and places that we were certain had all but disappeared. His candid use of reclaimed materials recalls the unrevealed and historicized nature of the things we use, siphoned through a multilingual vernacular that simultaneously questions and redefines our understanding of meaning.”

About the curator – Evan J. Garza:

A native of Houston, Texas, Evan J. Garza is the co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency, the first residency for emerging GLBT artists in the United States. william cordova: this one’s 4U (pa’ nosotros) is Garza’s second guest-curated exhibition for the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts. In 2010, he was the inaugural curator of the BCA Artist Studios Project.

The Boston Center for the Arts and Garza have partnered with the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum in Lincoln, MA where, for an entire year, the museum will exhibit William Cordova’s outdoor sculpture moby dick (for oscar wilde, oscar romero y oscar grant), 2008–2009, the bombed-out, spray-painted rear half of a reclaimed police car, a collaboration with Carlos Sandoval de Leon.