OPENING NIGHT RECEPTION: Friday, May 29, 6;00-9:00pm
ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE
"In this unforgettable series of photographs, Daniel Borris returns fromjourneys made over several years through central Mexico like an explorer ofold, bearing evidence of remarkable things seen, powerful places entered,and of how he found his way into the sacred center of an ancient world. These Mexican canchas are emblems of devotion to a game that is humanity'splanet-wide obsession, the consummate sport of our age of globalization.Borris discovers a way of seeing them that conjures memories ofMexico's ball game of antiquity. His eye finds another kind of grandeur andmajesty in places we might otherwise pass without noticing, revealing a profound continuity of Mexico's mystical legacy in unlikely, hidden away places."- John Philip Santos
"My initial interest in the soccer fields was dualistic. As I drove through Mexico I saw these goal posts in a sculptural sense as Land Art — minimal objects both defining and being defined by the landscape, akin to the work of Donald Judd or Nancy Holt. But I also saw the fields for what they were: evidence of humanity and reminders of the joy and drive to play the world’s most popular game.
In the most improbable settings I would find pitches marked by hand with neither perfect lines nor grass. Fields set against rising mountains, desert plains, and verdant forests. The goals placed like relics from another time imbued the scene with a sense of mystery — the feeling that comes from being in ancient places. As I continued to photograph I began to understand these soccer fields within the context of Mexico and its Pre-Columbian ball courts — El Juego de Pelota — sacred spaces where physical contest carried cosmological weight. These canchas reverberated with the poetic soul and heritage of Mexico's indigenous ancestry — as repositories of tradition, culture, and memory. They are the same earth, the same communities, and carry the same human impulse to mark out a field and play. The ground that remains long after human legs have run after a ball. They are the spaces where the game is learned — the roots of what the world now watches on the largest stage.”
-Photographer Daniel Borris
