Horace Mayfield will present work spanning from his earliest pieces when he lived in Socorro, New Mexico, through his middle period when he moved to a trailer park in Central El Paso, to the present day where he lives in the self-restored Villa Pompeii, a purple Roman-like petit trianon, in downtown El Paso, Texas.
Mayfield’s works depict apocalyptic visions of death and redemption. Within these powerful visions on the edge of the abyss a deep sense of religious spirituality can be felt. These works, consisting of a variety of everyday materials, display an uneasy coexistence of the cheerfully bright with the subtly disturbing.
New works to be presented in this exhibition are The Catullus Shower Curtain, The Cleavage of Juarez, Men Without Shadows and lastly a new piece inspired by Antonio Pollaiuolo’s engraving, circa 1460, The Battle of Naked Men.
At the exhibition opening Texan sculptor, and close personal friend of Mayfield, James Magee, will read from the works of Catullus while composer Douglas Cohen creates sonic textures from Magee’s spoken text. Cohen has also composed a sound installation based on Catullus’ texts to accompany the Mayfield exhibition.
New York composer Doug Cohen composed his sonic work, CATULLUS, in response to the CATULLUS SHOWER CURTAIN by El Paso artist Horace Mayfield. The interpretive readings within Mr. Cohen’s piece, both in Latin and English, were performed by their mutual friend, Texan James Magee. True, the shower curtain and the sonic piece are filled with non-sequitors. Yet they share an expansive and overreaching view of time and history as exemplified in the case of Mr. Cohen’s use of the original Latin text juxtaposed with their contemporary translations by Paul Schmidt. The same can be said for Mr. Mayfield’s commingling of contemporary images of Juarez shoppers with pictures from the walls of Pompeii and ancient Crete.
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