DAVIS, California — San Francisco-based artist Julio César Morales was born on the US/Mexico border in Zona Norte, the red-light district of Tijuana, Mexico. When he was 10, his household moved to San Ysidro, the southernmost group of San Diego County — only a block away from his birthplace, but in a special nation and adjoining to one of many busiest checkpoints on the earth.
This Baja California edge-land, the arbitrary and contested frontier, has been a lifelong obsession for Morales, a transdisciplinary artist who has been exploring the border’s violent and sophisticated realities in poetic type for over 30 years.
“OJO” Julio César Morales is a survey of greater than 50 works, together with 10 items created for the event, representing his refined hybrid observe of music, efficiency, video, drawing, images, and movie. A playlist as sonic narrative, curated and annotated by the artist, accompanies the present. This aspect deepens the emotional and thematic panorama with what Morales calls a “third-space rhythm,” an eclectic sound of blending cultures.
Set up view of Julio César Morales, (left) “OJO: Los Extranjeros” and (proper) OJO: Los Extranjeros (El Paso 1938) sequence (all 2025) (courtesy the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco; photograph courtesy the Manetti Shrem Museum, © Muzi Li Rowe)
The exhibition derives its title from a element Morales found in a Dorothea Lange {photograph} from 1938: a hand painted wooden signal, or rotulo, frequent to frame tradition, that reads “OJO” Los Extranjeros. Morales’s recreation of the signal hangs alongside a three-print sequence of the unique {photograph} behind blue-, yellow-, and red-tinted plexiglass.
“Ojo” instantly interprets from Spanish to English as “eye,” however it’s also a colloquial expression of warning: Open your eyes! Look out! Cuidado! “Extranjeros” interprets to “strangers” — for whom is it a warning? These arriving or these already there? This sequence and the exhibition as an entire level to this underlying paradox of the immigrant expertise.
The present crescendoes within the ultimate gallery, which options three of the artist’s strongest works (all from 2025), created in response to the 1982 movie The Border, Hollywood’s first dramatization of the US-Mexico border. A sequence of ghostly black cut-out film poster silhouettes populate the again wall of the gallery as two movies play face à face, alternating sequentially.
Set up view of Julio César Morales, “THE BORDER” (2025) (photograph Natasha Boas/Hyperallergic)
In his re-imagining of the film, “The Border (Los Pollos vs. La Migra)” (2025), Morales amends cinematic historical past to middle the immigrant’s viewpoint. “Los pollos vs. la migra” refers to a border model of the sport Cops and Robbers, the place los pollos are immigrants who’ve been killed and strung like slaughtered chickens by la migra, quick for immigration and slang for ICE. Morales makes use of a filter that splits the unique display screen to edit out the principle characters and permit an up-close and private take a look at these within the background.
The video “We Don’t See” (2025) reimagines The Border once more, this time from the attitude of Francisco Cantú, the artist’s buddy and a former Border Patrol agent. Cantú’s personal conflicted inner dialogue as a Mexican migra is overlaid in all yellow daring caps over drone footage of the Sonoran Desert: “We see none of his screaming, none of his conflicted emotions, none of his compensation, none of his moral outrage, none of his complexity.”
Set up view of Julio César Morales, “Las Líneas, 2028, 2022, 1845, and 1640” (2022), graphite on watercolor paper (courtesy the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco; photograph courtesy the Manetti Shrem Museum, © Muzi Li Rowe)
Two neon works are central to “OJO” Julio César Morales. One is “Las Lineas, 2028/2022/1845/1640,” which radiates red-hot Tijuana Avenida Revolución neon. It’s electrical, searing, and illuminating.The set up consists of 4 strains every denoting a interval of Mexico’s shifting border historical past: A future the artist imagines following a civil warfare within the US, after which California and New Mexico develop into impartial states with open borders to the south; the precise border in 2022; an 1845 border based mostly on the yr previous to the Mexican-American Conflict, when territorial boundaries shifted considerably; and an unique boundary of of 1640, earlier than the arrival of Europeans, spanning from the Cocopah Indian Tribe in present-day California to the Karankawa folks in present-day New Mexico.
The opposite is a public fee put in inside the museum’s public plaza. The signal, constructed on humble picket scaffolds, reads in Gothic neon letters, “tomorrow is for those who can hear it coming” — a riff on the slogan David Bowie coined to advertise his album Heroes. This burnished multivalent message units up the potent by line of “OJO” Julio César Morales: In right this moment’s social local weather, who has the privilege of getting a future and who doesn’t?
Julio César Morales his work “Invaders” (2010) on the Manetti Shrem Museum (photograph Natasha Boas/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Julio César Morales’ Undocumented Interventions sequence (2010–11) on the Manetti Shrem Museum (courtesy the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco; photograph courtesy the Manetti Shrem Museum, © Muzi Li Rowe)
Julio César Morales, “We Don’t See” (2025), HD video and sound (photograph Natasha Boas/Hyperallergic)
Element of a piece from the OJO: Los Extranjeros (El Paso 1938) sequence (photograph Natasha Boas/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Julio César Morales, “tomorrow is for those who can hear it coming” (2025) exterior of the doorway to the Manetti Shrem Museum (photograph Natasha Boas/Hyperallergic)
“OJO” Julio César Morales continues on the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Artwork on the College of California, Davis (254 Previous Davis Street, Davis, California) by November 29. The exhibition was curated by Rachel Teagle.
