There’s an electric typewriter on a table; nearby stands a portable television set. In the recent past each of these conduits of ideas and sensations not only played a part in changing how we work, but transformed who and what we are. Today, both machines are obsolete, their tasks having been taken over by functionally streamlined replacements. What makes such obsolescence—the inescapable consequence of living and dying in time—visible and palpable, rather than something we only think about, is that each has been encased in a skin-like layer of wax. Unlike, say, the plastic film most things arrive wrapped in today, wax brings with it layers of significance. Its oily feel, malleability, the way it captures light, holds and responds to heat, and shows its history give wax a virtual power of speech. Wax whispers to us of the past, but its inert nature also makes promises for the future: “preserved in wax” speaks equally to science and art. Even sitting still, Jorge Rojas’ machines move away, merging into the past like ships sailing into mist. But they also argue for a future in which their descendants may become flesh. Humans and their work, alienated from each other by machines, will then be reunited. This may be among the last moments when we can still distinguish our tools from ourselves, and the understated revelation of these two sculptures may be the most disturbing turn in a room full of odd, challenging objects.

Given a good idea, the first choice an artist makes is what material suits it. Bronze can do things marble cannot, but marble suggests flesh in a way bronze doesn’t. The difference can have lasting consequences. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel with traditional fresco technique, essentially rough watercolor on fresh plaster, while his critic Leonardo painted the “Last Supper” in elegant egg tempera. A few years ago, Michelangelo’s works were carefully washed and emerged looking almost new, while visitors to the “Last Supper” today see a meticulously-researched copy of something that peeled off the wall centuries ago. Today’s artists benefit from new technologies that create new options, augmented by the aesthetic freedom to use non-traditional materials. Picasso’s choice to glue a newspaper to a painting to represent itself blew the doors wide open. Multiple media, applied democratically, became a valid option, while collage became the signature process of our time.

Carne y Huesos by Jorge Rojas

Rojas views his art, and his use of wax, as reaching back to Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and the minimalists who followed them, rather than the obscure, reactionary “postmodern” ideas that came later and denied that knowledge advances—or even exists. If art isn’t science—that is to say, if art rarely makes discoveries on the frontiers of knowledge—it can at least re-dress those discoveries in newly-invented and more accessible forms. Early ‘modernists’ used Classical myths and images to help make their contemporary versions of timeless truth accessible; Rojas does something analogous when he uses layers of wax to combine anatomical charts with bas-relief sculptures. The first time he buried one of these life-sized pictures under wax he had no idea what would happen, an approach that stands in marked contrast to artists who know, when looking at a subject, pretty much what their finished image will look like. For Rojas, then, ‘struggle’ isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a physical and emotional battle that may involve breaking a piece that refuses to reveal—and become—something new. In the diptych “Carne y Huesos (Flesh and Bones)”, smashing and re-fusing the mute material, then carving it into the likeness of what lay below, finally made it speak, forging marvelous connections between these idealized, abstract diagrams and the specific, real bodies of those who observe them. Despite the mundane elements that went into it, as one is drawn to peer into these flayed bodies, the closest thing we know to a miracle envelopes us: this is what we are . . . no more, but no less, either. White patches on the otherwise blue background lend the figures a hint of surreal vitality appropriate to their predicament: where but in dreams can mortal beings pose so calmly, their heads in lofty clouds of pretension, their fragmented, animal reality so utterly exposed?

Due to his exploratory process, not all of Rojas’ works achieve the same sort of apotheosis. Some, like “Anatomical Portrait” and “Los Calzones De?”, seem to look back to more conventional modes of representation. Others, like “Wax TV: My Space,” connect traditional art-making to new media like video and environmental sound. Like other materials in use today, wax chemistry has become more sophisticated, allowing a couple of sound sculptures—wall-mounted boxes containing wireless sound systems—to be fully three dimensional. Everything here uses multiple media, but in different ways. Three mural studies make wax stand in for something common among us all—flesh, say, or life itself?—while found wire-mesh hemispheres represent the ambivalent forces that dominate our lives, yet make individual transcendence possible.

As someone born in Mexico, who immigrated here to raise a family, Jorge Rojas cuts a familiar figure. As an artist, however, he is less typical: a one-time New Yorker who has exhibited on both coasts, and in between, and in Europe, whose objects resonate more with the Latin American avant-garde aesthetic of MOLAA (the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California) than with folkloristic Mexico, but who also, in a larger sense, approaches art comprehensively, dividing his energy between making art, teaching art-making, and curating the spectrum of his contemporary artists. While it’s altogether fitting to see him at Mestizo, he would also be at home at Kayo, the CUAC, or the Salt Lake Art Center. Waxworks suggests he may soon merge both identities: to connect this life, in this place, at this time, to something larger, for the benefit of all.

Jorge Rojas divides his video camera between art, curating, and teaching. Some videos fit more than one category. Wax TV: My Space, one of the mixed-media sculptures on display this month at Mestizo Gallery, is a television encased in wax: a thought-provoking object in itself, but also a working video monitor that alters whatever plays on it. Here, seen without the transmission filter of wax, are the excerpts from My Space — Live that play in the gallery. To see what they look like in situ may require asking someone at Mestizo to start the video. They won’t mind.

Sonic Sculpture #2 (2006) Wax, Wood Box, Mp3 Player, Speakers, “Music for Spaces” by Peter Van Ripper 6 x 9 x 5 by Jorge Rojas

Wax TV: My Space by Jorge Rojas

Jorge Rojas’ Waxworks is at the Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts through July 9.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.