René Garcia is a Mexican born in California (1968) presently based in Los Angeles. He uses elements of conceptual art practices constructed around performance, video, audio and installation art. Mr. Garcia creates digitally enhanced and electronically mediated works to explore significant current political themes and the uncovering of an evolving convergence between the human body and new technologies. He examines the manner in which biotechnologies and digital hardware have redirected the colonial imperative of manifest destiny away from land and space and into the human body.
Mr. Garcia is currently producing two new bodies of work. 9-1-BUY-1, a polymedia-performative event that uses the tragic day of September 11, 2001 (9/11) to humorously explore the launch of a new product called Terrorism and the new industry of Homeland Security. His second body of work is an installation project titled “Therapeutic Violence”. This work blends vintage medical technologies and artist made objects to conceptually tie the ideology of “manifest destiny” to corporeal violence on the human body.
Mr. Garcia is also collaborating with author and futuro-humanist Dr. Anne Balsamo on a continuing public art project “Too Concerned Citizens” which is engaged in critically surveying the socio-political landscape of the United States. He is also a co-founder of the former cyber-critical multi-media performance group, Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crítica. Their work humorously explored the hyperbolic discourse around cyberspace. Mr. Garcia also co-founded the former not for profit San Francisco Historical Circle of the Displaced, an organization that explored displacement in San Francisco through the creation of visual artwork. The circle was commissioned by the San Francisco Art Commission to produce a poster series that uncovered the hidden histories of displaced populations in San Francisco.
Mr. Garcia has performed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Lab in San Francisco and various universities across the United States. His work has shown at CU Art Museum in Boulder, Galeria de la Raza San Francisco, SOMArts Gallery and the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery. His video work has been presented in the Race in Digital Space Conferences at MIT, and the Studio Museum Harlem. Mr. Garcia was a co-recipient of a Creative Capital award (2002) Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize of New Langton Arts (2001) and the Creative Work Fund Grant (2000). The San Francisco Historical Circle of the Displaced was a recipient of the San Francisco Art commission Market Street Art in Transit Grant (1999). Mr. Garcia completed a Master Residency in performance with Guillermo Gomez-Peña in 2000 and received his BA from San Francisco State University.
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