Andrew Roberts
A house on fire is a ghost, a factory on fire is a specter
January 8 - February 12, 2022
A house on fire is a ghost, a factory on fire is a specter is a computer generated installation by Mexico City-based artist Andrew Roberts. Through an exploration of his family history and its close connection with the arms industry, the artist focuses on both of his grandfather’s —an American fighter pilot and a Mexican assembly line worker, or a soldier and an engineer— as two parallel figures within the military-industrial complex narrative.
Through the use of video game design and development software, Roberts recreates two long-lost sites that belonged to his family and that equally got lost to fire: a house located in California, property of his paternal grandfather, and a maquila in Tijuana, owned by his maternal grandfather. As a way to understand generational trauma, the work featured in this exhibition dismantles and critically analyzes the industrial interdependence between Mexico and the United States reconstructed by a personal story in a web of affective relationships, mental health policies, cross-border labor, and war technologies.
Andrew Roberts' (b. 1995, Tijuana) practice begins with a historical exploration of the parallel development of war technology and the entertainment industry, analyzing the role of images as operational weapons within colonial, racial and extractive mechanisms and their poetic, political, and aesthetic ramifications in the production of capital and death. His work employs elements from video games and the popular genres of cinema, taking on the form of multimedia narrative and speculative fiction, materialized across space through digital animations and immersive installations in the company of objects, actions, and writing.
His work has been shown in galleries and institutions like Museo Jumex (2021); the 7th Athens Biennale (2021); kurimanzutto (2021); Pequod Co. (2020); the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2018); Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (2018); Centro Cultural Tijuana (2017); and the San Diego Art Institute (2017); amongst others.
