Alex Bazán

Elemental Memory, 2021-25

The process for Elemental Memory emerged from artist Alex Bazán’s curiosity to explore the site of his grandparents’ former home in Ensenada, Baja California. Today, this area is part of the city’s dam, which was built in 1976 over the rubble of the community that the adobe home belonged to. Over the past decade, Bazán has immersed himself in his family’s past, gathering oral histories and archives, and creating sculptures and drawings from the area’s debris. Through his work, Bazán aims to restore metaphorically the vanished home of his family.

At the beginning of his INSITE project, Bazán’s aim was to trace the former communities’ architectural ruins and skeletal structures that emerge as the water level in the dam recedes. However, due to heavy rainfall over the past three years, the site has been transformed into an artificial lake and recreational area for kayakers. The artist inspected the site for the first time by canoeing around his grandfather’s water tank, which was built over a boulder and is the only visible remnant of his grandfather’s property today. While these excursions resulted in a series of landscape drawings by the artist—exploring water as a medium through immersion, erosion, weathering, and frottage—they also signalled a new understanding of natural phenomena.

Bazán was also inspired by the minimalist artist Donald Judd’s travel to Baja California in the 1970s, when Judd documented the region’s vernacular adobe architecture, which later informed his work in Marfa, Texas. Following his steps, Bazán embarked on his own journey through Baja California and discovered petroglyphs and cave paintings from the first seminomadic settlements on the peninsula. This trip led to a new series of drawings of giant figures made with dust, fingerprints, and frottage. The selection of works presented in this exhibition traces Bazán’s process and research from his early debris sculptures to his fingerprint drawings. His work embodies a personal genealogy in the intersection of dwelling, natural phenomena, human intervention, and travel.