Eligible/Illegible
(Co-curated with Francisco Donoso)
March 25-April 16, 2023
PS122 Gallery
New York, New York
Stemming from an ongoing commitment to uplifting other migrant, undocumented, and queer artists, Eligible/Illegible refuses limitations imposed by identity categories and instead presents a focused grouping of artists intervening and re-making state-sponsored documents. The exhibition’s title conjures the often arbitrary and violent systems of eligibility imposed on migrant bodies and the tactics of opacity artists use to reject those demands. Jonathan Molina-Garcia, Fidencio Fifield-Perez, Nancy Rivera, and Rodrigo Moreira use painting, weaving, installation, and photography to negotiate personal and familial experiences with migration, leveraging abstraction and illegibility to upend pressures to be visible. The exhibition presents these interwoven bodies of work in a context beyond the “outsider” gaze, as these artists are part of the communities the curators belong to. The magnitude of the traumas inflicted by these systems and of the physical paper trails they require is countered by these artists’ choices to create work at an often intimate scale, both physically and emotionally. These artists question the consequences and limitations of legibility and eligibility, demonstrating the power of (chosen) family, meditative processes and rich materiality, and queer intimacies that provide respite in the face of violences.