Eduardo Sarabia
Fine Arts - 1999
Eduardo Sarabia ('99), born in L.A., lives in Berlin and Guadalajara. His work honors
and mocks his Latino heritage through exposing Mexican cultural clichés about drug
smuggling, banditry, and the import/export of tawdry contraband. He stages semifictional
events, for which he creates the fake evidence: handcrafted ceramic objects, drawings,
paintings, photographs, and sculptures. An installation titled “A Thin Line between
Love and Hate” (2005) juxtaposed shipping boxes screenprinted with “Maizena,” “Producto
de Colima”) and the containers’ “real” contents—blue-and-white Chinese-style vases
decorated with images of pinup girls, marijuana leaves, rifles, and skulls. ...
At Salon Aleman, in Berlin, created for curator Anton Vidokle's Unitednationsplaza,
patrons drank the artist’s Sarabia tequila. Playing on the stereotype of Latinos as
cantina dwellers, Sarabia exposed the symbiosis between the third-world poverty of
rural agave farming and tequila production and the first-world market economy. His
work blends humor and absurdity, reinforcing the importance of considering the physical
and human consequences of economic forces.
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