Tank — Andrew Roberts

Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, 2023. Medical grade silicone, 3D print in polylactic acid, polyurethane foam, steel armature, pulley, hook, chain, resin and paint. Variable dimensions.

The history of the sea as a war platform —and its fantastic allegorization into cultural artifacts— dates back to the first European voyages to the Americas. Legends of aquatic monsters plagued the imagination of explorers, immediately marking all living beings on the continent, including its natives, as other. These mythical creatures quickly moved from popular lore into propagandistic etchings, official chronicles, and cartographies, effectively becoming tools of conquest. The exhibition posits that we cannot recognize the ocean as a theater of operations without first understanding the foundational myths that shaped it.

This dark tradition of rendering bodies of water as battlegrounds extends directly into the present. The 1990s saw the opening of Baja Studios —a massive filming tank owned by 20th Century Fox— just south of the US-Mexico border near the artist's hometown of Tijuana. This studio hosted productions like Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and Deep Blue Sea, films known for their rhetoric of military interventionism and their depiction of the ocean as a space that needed to be conquered. While fossil fuel was being extracted from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico, the US film industry was simultaneously portraying the sea as little more than an amusement park for extractivism.

Tank is an intersectional exhibition that investigates the ocean as both a site of industrial violence and a perennial subject of science fiction. The exhibition immerses the viewer in this environment. Three large-scale sculptures inhabit the space, composed of silicone elements, 3D prints, and metallic devices. Each work occupies the threshold between a film prop and an archaeological find. Maritime illustrations are transformed into tattoos; historical bestiaries are reconfigured into chrome bas-reliefs; and colonization chronicles take the monstrous form of sea creatures with silicone skin.

Fish-Handler's Disease, 2023. Medical grade silicone, pigmented silicone, 3D print in polylactic acid, polyurethane foam, resin, paint, aluminum table and bucket. Variable dimensions.

Acute Decompression Syndrome, 2023. Medical grade silicone, 3D print in polylactic acid, polyurethane foam, resin and paint. Variable dimensions.

Tank, Installation view at Pequod Co., Mexico City, 2023.

All photos by Sergio López.