Marcus Xavier Chormicle: You're Meant To Be Here, With The Living 

In his newest body of photographs, Las Cruces-based artist Marcus Xavier Chormicle looks closely at the legacies of masculinity within his family. Tracing the lives of family members he has lost, he considers the intergenerational impact of loss and memory. At the heart of the exhibition, an installation titled My Uncle’s Baptism portrays his uncle in a swimming pool, lifted into the air as he leaps into the water; the series is the last portrait Chormicle made of his uncle before he passed away prematurely. Other photographs mark personal landscapes, domestic interiors, and reflections on violence: My Grandfather’s Blood and Their Mark on our Skin tell the story of police shootings that Chormicle witnessed. Other landscapes bear the traces of military histories: Our Scar on the Land, for example, documents the architecture of Fort Selden, New Mexico, a US military outpost where White and Black soldiers were stationed to kill Apache Native Americans. “This image,” Chormicle writes, “challenges New Mexican myths of a harmonious multicultural melting pot and rather highlights the brutal and violent history, specifically the genocide carried out against Indigenous people in the area by the US government and the systemic erasure of those horrific histories within the region.” Within his work, Chormicle brings together these national and regional histories with the evidence of their devastating impacts and legacies on his own family. The result is a meditative, sometimes startling, reflection on grief and the lived experience of our entangled histories.

About the Artist

Marcus Xavier Chormicle is a lens-based artist whose work focuses on family, memory, and the intersections of class, race, and history in the U.S. Southwest. His work Still Playing with Fire offers a multigenerational reflection on the violence of Southern New Mexico and its impact on the people living there today. In Say Uncle, he celebrates heritage and family, while following his uncles through the canyons of their ancestral homeland on the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation. Chormicle recently closed the Cristian Anthony Vallejo Memorial Gallery in Las Cruces, an art space dedicated to his late cousin, who passed away in 2020. During the two years the gallery was in operation, he organized 15 exhibitions of primarily Indigenous and Latinx artists, through artistic reflections on generational cycles, issues of migration, spirituality, and Indigenous expressions of place. He recently completed a residency at Light Work in Syracuse, New York.

Supported by a generous Mellon Foundation grant, Genius Loci looks at the ways in which our local context informs artists’ practices. This exhibition is curated by Laura Augusta, PhD.

For more information about the Genius Loci exhibition series and selection process, CLICK HERE.