JULIO CESAR MORALES ::::
born in 1966, Tijuana, Mexico
lives and works in San Francisco

Morales is an artist, educator, and curator currently based in san Francisco. His artwork uses a range of media— including photography, video, print, and digital—to make conceptual projects that address the productive friction that occurs in transcultural territories such as urban Tijuana and San Francisco, and in media such as popular music and graphic design.

A series of photo-based illustrations that document the informal economies of street vendors from Tijuana, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Informal Economy Vendors explores the influence of Latin American urban economic strategies that appear in California as a result of economic adaptation. Street vending reflects a response to these conditions; street vendors adapt their trade by using innovative equipment and spatial strategies to make their products and services marketable. These forms of informal commercial activity are one of the ways Mexican-American vendors adapt to social space and re-create the sense of public life they left behind while “contaminating” the urban landscape of California cities. The work intends to develop a multiple process of new ways in which to document a cultural phenomenon: first by photographing the subjects and then by digitally illustrating the outlines and design of the vending carts. From there, the illustrations are cut on vinyl or wood and reconstructed in an exploded view in order to visually examine the cart’s innovative design and hybrid parts. Finally, a life-sized version of the vinyl cut is produced as a form of an illustrative street icon. For World Factory, Morales will work with students on production and realization of a sculptural mural installation.

Tactics of Reassembly uses digital media and algorithms to represent the way in which the street vendor’s cart actually functions as a mechanism for recycling materials (or trash) found in the streets of tijuana. Based on the visual abstraction of various photographs and sounds of street vendors staged against a typical tijuana landscape, this work literally explodes the carts into their components and, based on an algorithm, allows them to “find their way” to completion. every sequence is different as the parts are randomly distributed, scaled, and rotated—reflecting the processes that reduced them to their components in the first place.