It Was Only a Dream

Edgar Reyes

May 18–June 22, 2024

Edgar Reyes, “Retablo de la Curandero” (2023), acrylic paint, spray paint, wood, and card, dimensions variable. Photo: Vivian Marie Doering

“Cosecha” (2024), fajo piteado (leather embroidered with agave thread), dimensions variable. Photo: Vivian Marie Doering

Inspired by his experience growing up undocumented in the Washington, DC-area (locally referred to as the DMV) amid the sensationalization of organized crime in the early 2000s, Edgar Reyes’s new body of work teases at the blurred lines between Chicano masculinity, criminality, and cultural identity.

Abstracting images from his family archive and layering them with found Chicano relics, Reyes invites viewers into a geometric, pixelated dreamscape reminiscent of his boyhood. Through sculpture, installation, and prints on fabric, Reyes renders the complicated beauty of Mexican American identity and ideals, interrogating the conditions that have come to define them.

Situated in the haze of memory and media, It Was Only a Dream reflects the ways in which projection can warp perceptions and how nostalgia can distort the past.

Artist

Edgar Reyes (b. Guadalajara, Mexico; lives and works in Baltimore, MD) earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2014), and BA in Graphic Design and Photography from Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, VA (2012).