Exhibition - Joey Enriquez: As I Look Towards What Could Have Been Mine

as i look towards what could have been mine is Joey Enríquez’s elegiac ode to the desert of the American Southwest, a place synonymous with the artist’s personal ethnography, familial ancestry, and, for the artist, a place where their soul is at rest. Taking viewers to the edge of ruins, both metaphorical and literal, Enríquez alludes to the deserts’ innate expansiveness through poetic prose, printmaking, sculpture, and found object installations.

Enríquez’s abstracted desert revels in paradox. Here, the desert is presented as both unforgiving and romantic: a place of last resorts, desolation, and death; but also a place lush with awe-inspiring grace and tranquility. Contrasting the remains of a ruined adobe structure with a broken stained glass window that looks out onto the vastness of an open pit mine, Enríquez places sun-bleached fragments of prose declarations atop hand-printed landscape vistas. These writings—all original and often confessional—allude to love, fear, and memories of the desert from the artist’s childhood. In its construction and tone, as i look towards what could have been mine aspires to the scale and reverence of a cathedral: monumental and imposing, yet intimate.

The desert reminds us of our mortality and of our place within the vastness of the universe. In as i look towards what could have been mine, the desert is at once a place of despair and a site of communion: with ourselves, with nature, and with love.

Joey Enríquez (born Simi Valley, CA, 1997), is an artist, designer, educator, and geographer in the Washington, D.C. area who uses image-making, sculpture, and community engagement as a practice of remembrance and critical fabulation. They focus on politics of land, body, and occupation in their work, and their practice is informed by archival research and reclamation of their own Nde (Apache) indigeneity. Enríquez earned their B.A. in Design from California Lutheran University (2018) and their M.F.A. in Fine Arts at George Washington University (2020). They’ve been awarded fellowships and residencies at Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, D.C. (2020–22), The Studios at MASS MoCA (2021), and MoCA Arlington (2022–present). Their artwork has been shown at The Kreeger Museum, Hamiltonian Artists, and Culture House in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Arlington, VA; and Edge on the Square in San Francisco, CA. Enríquez’s practice has extended beyond their artwork into project support and graphic design for the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at GW as well as for the artist collective Related Tactics (Michele Carlson and Weston Teruya). Recently, after entering the field of geography, Enríquez was part of a team of geographers working with The Nature Conservancy (Maryland/DC chapter) towards completing a report to be presented to legislators and stakeholders titled “SEAFARE (Supporting Equitable Access to Funding for Adaptation Resources)” at the 2024 National Adaptation Forum in Saint Paul, MN. Enríquez has taught at the Corcoran at GW, American University, and George Mason University as an adjunct for the past four years. In their spare time, they’re an avid runner and motorcyclist.