Methodology
Jason Mena examines the interplay between value, labor, and systems of circulation, often through the lens of cultural displacement. Working across media—including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and photography—he adopts a research-driven approach that fuses formal experimentation with conceptual rigor. Each project unfolds through archival inquiry, fieldwork, and site-specific investigation, allowing material and context to guide the work’s evolution.
Much of his practice is concerned with how global forces infiltrate and shape local realities. By mapping these conditions onto broader historical and economic frameworks, he seeks to expose the asymmetries between center and periphery. This often leads to sites and objects marked by rupture—remnants of failed systems, whether economic, architectural, or bureaucratic—which are reframed to reveal their latent ideological residue.
His work is further informed by a sustained engagement with collective structures. Having founded and directed La Embajada, an independent artist-run space in Santa María la Ribera, Mexico City, for over a decade, he developed an approach to art rooted in the dynamics of collaboration, self-organization, and mutual support. This ethos extends from his studio practice to the creation of spaces for dialogue and co-production with artists, institutions, and publics, where authorship, access, and agency are continually negotiated.
In navigating the spaces between independent and collaborative modes of making, Mena produces work that is materially grounded and politically attuned. Whether through nuanced acts of reframing or more overt spatial interventions, his focus lies in articulating the invisible infrastructures that shape contemporary life—using gaps, disconnections, contradictions, and misinterpretations not as symbols, but as operational tools to trace how power circulates, where it breaks down, and how it might be reconfigured through artistic engagement.
Ultimately, Mena’s creative process seeks to open spaces for tension, reflection, and encounter, holding complexity not as an obstacle, but as a necessary and urgent condition of our time.