Jose Dávila (b. 1974, Mexico) is best-known for works that are balancing acts of commonplace materials that poignantly suggest the interpersonal entanglements and networks of dependence that constitute society. And with these, reflecting his own deep idealism and optimism, he makes obliquely eloquent arguments for the maintenance and care of those networks. Further, these balancing acts tend to make us feel that investing our awareness in webs of contingency and fragility is beautiful and heroic. In El pasado nunca es el mismo, his site-specific exhibition for Casa Wabi, using nothing more than construction-site refuse collected from all over Puerto Escondido and a concept called collective memory, Dávila has set out to make concrete an idea of honoring the past and inhabiting history very different from the way that monuments have traditionally commemorated people and events.
