![]() Out is the pink sound foam from the exhibition in is an ornate arrangement of nearly 100 Beanie Babies. Some of the mirrors are cracked (the result of all the moves) and Tena and a crew of friends have added a pitched wooden roof, which allowed them to insert windows and air conditioning. The object before me is not the one I remember. The last time I laid eyes on “Migrant Dubs” was in a New York museum more than a dozen years ago. There, it functions as a control booth for a recording studio in the nearby garage. Accompanying him is his sidekick Pierre, a scruffy terrier mix who in the Jaichackers’ video can be seen trotting about in a vest made from Mexican textiles.Įarlier this month, Tena took me on a tour of the cube, which has been reconstituted in the Pasadena backyard of Matt Jones, a co-founder of indie label Castle Face Records. On the morning of our interview, I find him decked out in a black suit, striped shirt and black-and-white saddle shoes trimmed with pink chiffon laces by Mexican designers Minena. He is tall - 6 feet 4 - with a mane that channels ‘80s rocker (long and resplendent) and a style that is deeply saturated and gender bendy. If anybody is liable to make you believe in magic, it’s the magnetic Tena, 30, who is happy to talk John Cage one minute and quinceañera playlists the next. “Just to move it would have cost me like $400 and then I’d need another place to put it.” So, when he moved out of his studio, Ore-Girón told the owner of the building he could sell it for scrap. ![]() But, by 2012, the artist, who was bouncing between cities, was finding it hard to hold onto a work that, crates and all, likely weighed somewhere between one and two tons. When the tour ended in 2010, the piece was returned to Ore-Girón’s studio in South Los Angeles. It was a prominent (and noisy) component of “ Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement,” which was on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008 before traveling to five other museums, including El Museo del Barrio in New York and and the Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. “ Migrant Dubs” was intended to highlight the ways culture gets adapted - as when, say, a Latin party band turns Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In the Wall” into groovy cumbia. Its interior space was used to screen videos of neighborhood bands doing covers of popular songs. Built on a steel armature, its pristine exteriors were covered in mirrors and emblazoned with the Jaichackers name. In 2008, artists Julio César Morales and Eamon Ore-Girón, working under the moniker Los Jaichackers (a play on “hijackers”), created a large cube that was part minimalist sculpture, part functional room.
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