Michael Menchaca

A Cage Without Borders

Three-channel video installation

About the artist

Michael Menchaca

Michael Menchaca (they/them) is an interdisciplinary Queer Xicanx / non-binary millennial artist using print media and new media formats to generate anti-colonial & anti-racist visions of the world. As a Mexican-American born and raised in San Antonio, TX—a community with colonial roots in military and civil policing practices—Menchaca registers the perspective of a caste oppressed polity struggling to break free from historical patterns of cruelty by neo-colonial ascendancy. Like many Tejanxs, they are constantly mediating the internalized racist, ableist, and gendered myths embedded in them by the legacy of white supremacy in the Americas. They regard their art production as an ongoing practice of decolonial resistance and as a repudiation of the industrial violence work contributing to the destruction of sustainable life on madre tierra.

They have developed a personalized lexicon of animal archetypes and narrative pattern designs, or digital codex, to assist in mythologizing the interwoven histories of European colonization, U.S. slavery/mass incarceration, and trending technochauvenist* settler-colonial projects privileging dominant caste economics, algorithmic exploitation of the historically oppressed, and cultural gentrification via commercial A.I. assisted technologies. Their vector-based imagery blends the framework of ancient Mesoamerican Codices, European Bestiaries, and Japanese Video Games with the seductive, attention-seeking interfaces of Big Data Technologies. Recent work addresses the ways in which government agencies and U.S. Tech companies have co-constructed a digital caste system, or A Cage Without Borders, in what can be defined as our current age of “The New Jim Code.”* Menchaca creates multimedia installations that apply a combination of printmaking, painting, and digital animation, exploring Latinx/Latiné identities in a hyper-mediated American landscape.