Morales has three pieces in the museum that lead you to the main exhibit. Morales’ first piece “Broken Line” is located in the JP Morgan Chase lobby. This piece is on the United States-Mexico border, to emphasize the barrier and challenge folks have when wanting to live a better life, which introduces the “Invaders” collection.
“Invaders” is centered around a statement that questions who is considered the invader when discussing the history and feud of the United States and México. “Who is the invader and who is being invaded?” Morales says.
Morales grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. In 1996, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Arts Institute. His inspiration came from his family and experiences of living in a border town. However, “Invaders” is not about politics or related to current events.
The second piece, “Undocumented Interventions #21,” is part of an ongoing series of failed border crossing attempts called “Undocumented Interventions.” Morales used watercolors as a “soft medium” to highlight the reality of a person hiding inside the seat of a car. He informed the audience that when Border Patrol officers check cars “they touch the seat really hard to see if it is empty or to make the person inside say ‘Ouch.’” All of the images in this series were sourced from US Customs and Border Patrol.
“Regardless if you spend $20 million on a new fence, this is how people are getting these things in,” Morales said, emphasizing people’s creative ways of smuggling and transporting across borders.
Morales asked the little boy in the front row to read the words on the wall behind him: “Seven pounds of Meth Found in Nacho Cheese,” which is part of the “Narco Headlines” series that are failed border crossing attempts but in a comical and simple fashion. Morales wrote these headlines in black watercolor and ink on white paper. Simple but meaningful.
“I work with any medium necessary according to what the piece is about,” Morales says. “For such a harsh reality, the softest medium as an artist is: watercolors.”
The Marshall/Hendler Gallery (Katz Wing) is where the rest of the “Invaders” collection is located, as well as the artwork from recipients of the 2018 Contemporary Forum Artist Grant.
“Mr. Potato Head Full of Ecstasy” and “4.5 Lbs. of Cocaine Found in Dreadlocks” are also part of “Narco Healines.” Attendee Catie Chase used “Clever” and “Humorous” to describe these headlines.
Morales has three videos on display: “Boy in a Suitcase,” “Contrabando” and “We Are The Dead Part 1 and 2.”
“Until recently graphic design started to appear more in my artwork, more colors and more lines,” Morales says as he talks about his “Day Dreaming” piece. This piece is a collage of photographs of the current fence on the U.S.- Mexico Border but with transparent colored-abstract lines that are printed on the photos.
“Being here in Phoenix has changed my work in the sense that, the work is really about my family,” but Morales explains that most of the in the gallery was created in Phoenix. Morales’s grandfather told him, “I understand what you do, your work is about us” after seeing his work for the first time.
