To Be Whole in the Desert
To Be Whole In The Desert
Marcus Xavier Chormicle
Opens December 28th, 2024 7-9pm
To Be Made Whole In The City is a landscape and portrait photographic installation from artist Marcus Xavier Chormicle. The landscapes were made during Chormicle’s first time living in a heavily urban area (2017-2020). The city carried a weight that at times seemed to flatten the very spirit of the individual, and produce a homogenized being. When Chormicle decided to re-approach the work in 2024, he felt differently about the city. There is space to carve out individuality and resist the flattening of self. The portraits assert the individuals as whole beings, 3 Dimensional people, who exist in relation to each other, the land and the spirit, resisting the weight of the city.
The inherent hope found in people living their lives, and choosing to continue to make art, and be in community with one another shows that no city, idea or agenda is capable of truly flattening us.
Marcus Xavier Chormicle
Marcus Xavier Chormicle is a lens-based artist and independent curator from Las Cruces, New Mexico and lineal descendant of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. His work focuses on family, memory, and the intersection of class, race, and history in the Southwest.
He recently closed the Cristian Anthony Vallejo Memorial Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico, an art space dedicated to his late little cousin who passed away of a drug overdose in 2020. During the two year run at the gallery he curated 15 exhibitions of primarily Indigenous and Latinx artists, with exhibitions focusing on generational cycles, issues of migration, spirituality, and Indigenous ways of expressing place.
In 2023 he completed the Light Work Artist in Residency Program in Syracuse, New York, and in 2024 he completed the New Mexico Arts Fellowship and residency in Lincoln New Mexico.
In 2024 he has split his time between Las Cruces, NM and Séc-He (Palm Springs, CA), his ancestral homeland, to develop ongoing projects. This year he has shown in Phoenix, El Paso, Las Cruces, and Tucson, with plans to show in Palm Springs in March 2025. Additionally he recently co-curated an exhibition of 5 Indigenous artists at Smoke The Moon, a gallery space in Santa Fe, NM that opened during the weekend of Indian Market.
