Ed Gomez: Sacred Disruption

The following is a guest post by Armando Pulido, curator of Sacred Disruption. This exhibition will be on view at MXCL BNL LAB in Whittier from January 25 – March 8, 2025

In 1986, Ed Gómez became possessed. The exhibition Je suis le Cahier (“I am the sketchbook”) at the Phoenix Art Museum completely bewitched him. Gómez had just absorbed 175 of the artist Pablo Picasso’s sketchbooks, prompting him to immediately begin a flurry of drawings that would come to mark the beginning of his career.

In the fall of 2001, Gómez witnessed the unthinkable during his first semester of his MFA program at Otis College of Art and Design: The Twin Towers were struck by two, consecutive planes on September 11th, sending shockwaves through the nation. Though the date marks a time of tragic loss, it also represented a shift in the way the United States would address President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, escalating its pervasive surveillance technology and further antagonizing Muslim communities in the United States. This hard shift in ideology had cascading effects on immigrants across the nation, with increased nativist hostility and tightening of immigration policies implemented shortly thereafter. These historical conditions had an everlasting effect on Gómez’s interpretation of history and culture through his art. Evidenced by an evolving art and design practice, he has also embedded these beliefs with his work as Co-Founder and Curator of the MexiCali Biennial.

This exhibition brings together work from across the artist’s 25-year-long interdisciplinary practice, particularly highlighting his use of space imagery, extraterrestrial presence, philosophy, and biblical allegory to question American power, resistance, and control. At times existential, these themes grapple with reality and invite us to locate the harmonizing potential of popular cultural tropes. In recent years, Gómez appears determined to invite us on a journey beyond – one that examines the underbelly of American power, it’s tendrils of domination, and the morsels of unifying totems in our culture.

Gómez’s recent paintings reevaluate the science fiction of the American landscape as sections of the American West are cast as a no man’s land. Instead, we come into contact with UFOs hovering amongst majestic landforms. Are these extraterrestrial visitors or human-made inventions from a time beyond? With space as the subject, time is thrown into question as we are unable to effectively determine if these sites are pulled from the deep past or visions of the future. This temporal disruption removes the landscapes from histories of colonial intervention and American expansionism, instead shifting our focus to land and those who belong to it. When thinking about the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, our notions of belonging are impeded by man-made boundaries and conceptualizations of nation-states. The use of science fiction then grants us the opportunity to imagine a world where the only foreigners here hail from another planetary universe.

In July 2004, NASA’s Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe reached Saturn and its moons. Together, the devices heroically beamed home data that transformed our understanding of Saturn’s planetary system. Cassini’s narrow-angle camera, which captured visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light, ultimately allowed for detailed color imaging of the planet, its rings, and moons. These images were then combined to create a composite picture, revealing the fine details in Saturn’s atmosphere and rings. Gómez became enthralled with this image-making process, describing it as an interplay between abstraction (data) and representation (composite image). Presented as abstract paintings, this series complicates the relationship between art, data, and science by further mediating the images as art objects. A parallel is then created between the levels of technical mediation that messaged galactic data into our world with the need for human intervention required to colorize the data – all with the goal of sharing this discovery with the masses.

Shuttle marks a major disruption in the history of modernist painting. Representational, three-dimensional, and reflective of popular culture, the painting goes against prominent art critic Clement Greenberg’s defining beliefs that argued for the exact opposite. Reflecting the maximalist imagination of the landmark science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Gómez retooled this painting to become the antithesis of formalist painting, a style most celebrated at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Shuttle further serves as a testament to the evolution of painting as a discipline, similar to the evolution of humankind reflected in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The source imagery for this painting comes from a 2004 National Geographic magazine that featured detailed photos of the Space Shuttle Discovery, first launched in 1984. Through this layered approach, Gómez reckons with frustrations against humankind’s desire to colonize other planets, especially at the height of the global War on Terror that was used to justify violence inflicted upon millions of people in the Middle East. Detailed, other-worldly, and a jab at the art historical canon, the painting stands as a culminating point in the artist’s trajectory as cultural observer and disruptor.

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Revelation 6:8

The Pale Horse first appeared in the Book of Revelation in the Bible, alongside an account of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (also represented in the gallery). As the quote reveals, the mythical beast is a symbol of death meant to destroy the earth. It is difficult not to think of the violence enacted by American imperialism, colonial expansion in the name of Manifest Destiny, and genocidal warfare in today’s terms. Conspiracy theorist and former United States Naval Intelligence Briefing Team member William Cooper drew a similar relationship in his book Behold a Pale Horse (1991). In it, he revealed information from classified government documents that helped him predict the lowering of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the invasion of Panama, all before he was ultimately killed in a 2001 shootout with sheriff’s deputies. Pale Horse, a life-size Arabian horse, draws this connection between the biblical and the contemporary through title and materiality: its base is made of Styrofoam, a material that has been rightfully criticized for being non-biodegradable and containing carcinogens that poison humans and the environment alike. Just as Pale Horse will physically live beyond us, the stories that birthed it and the warnings it rings will likely continue to transcend our time as well.

Paired with Pale Horse, the Horsemen represent contemporary figures at the precipice of societal degradation. Figures in hazmat suits signal the global pandemic that eventually followed their creation while also alluding to nuclear waste, biohazardous materials, and other unholy detritus that require their maintenance. A protester and a police officer in anti-riot gear stand as opposites at the center. These figures recall recent collective action against police brutality, forced deportations, exploitative labor practices, and international struggles against oppressive surveillance states. Though some of these figures appear benign, Gómez invites us to question just who might be at the helm of the Pale Horse’s destructive forces and if there is any chance to correct the course of accelerated collapse and confrontation.

For 25 years, Ed Gómez has worked to educate students and fellow artists. In 2010, he procured dozens of educational posters sold in dollar stores that promoted respectful values, quick facts, or motivational phrases for young audiences. He was interested in the role these posters played in teaching students to regurgitate information from the American educational system rather than promote critical inquiry. Such conditioning perhaps lends itself to forms of control, a thought Gómez played with by layering modular screenprint designs onto these posters. Each was then encoded with the acronyms “WTF,” “WMD,” and “LOL” to question quick messaging as a form of language control. “WMD” indicates “weapons of mass destruction,” which became popularized with the justification of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror. Associated Apache helicopters – one of the most lethal weapons of imperialism – also manifest at the corner of each poster grouping. The layered messages reveal themselves to the inquisitive viewer. Together, the posters paint a picture of American propagandistic tendencies that have allowed a surveillance state to flourish amidst a constant deluge of information, media, and visual messaging.

This pastel was created by 12-year-old Ed, just one year after he witnessed Picasso’s art for the first time. Mimicking the artist’s famed Cubist style, Ed’s penchant for color is evident in the multicolor haze behind a crucifixion scene. He signed and dated the piece on the back. I thought it was such a perfect example of Ed’s lifelong commitment to art history, biblical stories, and innate passion for making art.

Across time and cultures, sacred geometries have summoned a spiritual significance in their order and repetition. Wall presents Gómez’s desire to make sense of the foundational structures of the universe through these design principles. Rather than strive for perfect order, Gómez retained the inconsistencies of his digitally-born design, likening the experience to humankind’s imperfect creations. The repeated triangular pattern recalls the significance of the shape in philosophy and religion as a symbol of synthesis and the holy trinity. Three layered wooden boards also comprise each 3 x 3 ft. panel, embedding its construction with this belief system. Wall also recreates the phenomenon of the U.S.-Mexico border as it separates the gallery from a direct view outside, despite being able to see through it. Color, pattern, and unifying design suspend the sculpture in a holy tension as it recalls the divisive nature of the militarized border while attempting to decipher the expansive nature of the universe.

-Armando Pulido