A first-generation American of Colombian and Mexican descent, Harold Mendez (b. 1977, Chicago) produces artworks that engage the long arc of hemispheric history in the Americas, from the ancestral cosmologies of the continents’ original inhabitants to the diasporic knowledges that came with forced and unforced migrations from Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, and which form such an important part of New World cultures. Working in photography, sculpture, sound, and installation, Mendez’s objects explore cultural memory, ritual, and transnational experiences. The porous borders between fiction and truth, visibility and absence, material bluntness and ethereal, poetic moods run through his work, making a case for the articulation of complex narratives as the necessary outcome of the culturally rich and deeply stratified spaces of the Americas.