Enrique Chagoya
Liberty, 2006
Jacquard tapestry
72 x 74 in
Edition of 8

Enrique Chagoya playfully examines contemporary cultural and internal borders in his first tapestry, Liberty. The artist depicts a plush domestic interior, reduced to a flat anonymity using stark red lines; its placid blankness is interrupted by the presence of sinister carbon-black dinosaurs, rendered in bold strokes of charcoal. In the foreground, a tiny, “realistically” colored dinosaur bearing the head of Jesus is menaced by an enormous Tyrannosaur while resting upon the stenciled word LIBERTY. Besides the impersonal and military connotations of the stencil, its letters are reversed, suggesting an inversion of the word’s meaning and perhaps implying that it is being stenciled onto the viewer. As the artist noted in a 2001 interview, “the reality of the human experience, it’s completely wilder than any boundary that we could limit.” -Nick Stone