Methodology
Jason Mena's practice explores the interplay between value, labor, and systems of circulation, often through the lens of cultural displacement. Working across media—including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, interventions, 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.
His process is often concerned with how global forces infiltrate and shape local realities. By mapping these conditions onto broader historical and economic frameworks, he exposes asymmetries between center and periphery. This inquiry frequently leads to sites and objects marked by rupture—remnants of failed systems, whether financial, architectural, or bureaucratic—which are reframed to reveal their latent ideological residue.
A long-standing engagement with collective structures further informs his work. Having founded and directed for over a decade La Embajada, an independent artist-run space in Santa María la Ribera, Mexico City, he developed an approach to art grounded in the dynamics of collaboration, self-organization, and mutual support. This ethos has informed the development of responsive frameworks for dialogue and co-production with artists, institutions, and publics, in which authorship, access, and agency are continuously negotiated.
Navigating between independent and collaborative modes of making, Mena produces work that is materially grounded and politically attuned. Whether through subtle acts of reframing or more overt spatial interventions, his focus lies in articulating the invisible infrastructures that shape contemporary life—treating gaps, disconnections, contradictions, and misinterpretations not as symbols, but as operational tools for tracing how power circulates, where it fractures, 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.