Sheet: 22 x 14 1/8 inches
Alejandro Cartagena: In Between Spaces – Entre Espacios
North Gallery
On view May 31 – July 19, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, May 31 from 3 – 5pm; remarks at 3:45pm
San Francisco: Catharine Clark Gallery continues its Spring 2025 program with three solo exhibitions: Arleene Correa Valencia’s Codice Del Perdedor / The Losing Man’s Codex (South Gallery), featuring new works on Amate paper; Alejandro Cartagena’s In Between Spaces – Entre Espacios (North Gallery), a survey of major photographs and photocollages; and Nanci Amaka’s Cleanse / Three Walls (Media Room), a three-channel video installation recently presented at the Hawai’i Triennial 2025. All three exhibitions consider themes of migration, memory, and intergenerational healing.
Alejandro Cartagena's projects are primarily documentary-based, utilizing landscape and portraiture to examine social, urban, and environmental issues in Latin America. His work also engages the broader history of photography, reinterpreting how poignant issues have been addressed or represented in the past. This approach has expanded his work's aesthetic and conceptual scope, adding layers of meaning to his complex interpretations of our society. Born in the Dominican Republic, Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico, creating photo-based works that reflect on migration patterns and their interrelationship with local and global economies.
His debut exhibition at the gallery features selections from his now-iconic photo series "Carpoolers" (2011–2012). Cartagena writes that the "inception of ‘Carpoolers” was born in the 1980s, in the back of my grandfather's F150 truck. A construction worker all his life, he was the 'maestro' with a crew of workers carpooling to construction sites early in the mornings of Monterrey. Thirty years later, those memories became images on an elevated highway of this northeastern city at the height of Mexico’s housing boom. From an overpass, I photographed laborers riding to work in the beds of pickup trucks; anonymous workers like my grandfather and his crews, suspended between the promise of suburban homeownership and the reality of precarious labor.”
“Those frames,” Cartagena writes, “freeze an 'in-between' instant that is at once public and startlingly intimate, a fleeting architecture of bodies, tools, and tarps sliding through the city’s asphalt. The images reveal how policy, public urban programs, and economic aspiration conspire to shape the ways we occupy space in Latin American cities.” In Fall 2025, Cartagena will be the subject of a major solo survey exhibition at SFMOMA, curated by Shana Lopes, Assistant Curator of Photography, which will include work from this series.
In the accompanying photo collage series, We Are Things, Cartagena continues to examine anonymous Mexican bodies. He explains, "Sifting through flea-market shoeboxes and landfill heaps, I rescue discarded gelatin-silver prints: family portraits, school pictures, bureaucratic headshots.”
“I cut, hinge, and collage those fragments,” Cartagena continues, “dislocating faces from bodies, backgrounds from foregrounds, into new worlds suspended between the past and the present. What results is a sort of map of absences: silhouettes that speak louder than the likenesses that once fulfilled the social contract of what it meant to be photographed.”
