LACMA

In recent projects Sarabia has exercised his knack for inserting himself into his numerous conceptual circuits. For example, Sarabia has hired artisans in Mexico to create ceramic Talavera-style vases, which he then illustrates with marijuana leaves, strippers, guns, and other contraband, in Stolen Vases (2006). A tequila carrying his own name is developed and branded; El Güero Palma, a cantina/art space in Berlin that Sarabia started with Jose Davila, serves its own stock of Tequila Sarabia. These and other ventures are heavily researched projects that draw on the talents of any commercially successful artist and unapologetically drive the question toward our relationship to our material posses- sions. It's a process we've all participated in. A narcocorrido, a northern Mexican "cowboy" song about the culture of narcotics, can romanticize the narcotrafficking lifestyle by tying it to the past—outlaws and justice, love, wealth—while also lamenting the new, harsher realities. This arena that is both work and play asks hard questions about the strange world called "art" wherein one man's art is another man's labor. The undisciplined nature of these categories causes a certain discomfort within traditional criticism and ultimately makes one question the categories themselves. —BILL KELLEY JR. Could there possibly be something there? The idea of looking for buried treasure, a preoccupation in Eduardo Sarabia's work, makes one think about art on a wider scale. As treasures are never buried near their place of origin, so Sarabia's work touches on the transcontinental relationships valuable goods import, as well as the signifying weight they carry. Sarabia's travels from Los Angeles to his carefully researched and planned mining adventures in Mexico speak to all this. Labor exchange, desire, deal speculations, and markets of all color (black or otherwise) are seen as serious business. Sarabia's work seems to blur the lines between art and business. I say "business" to draw the distinction between business and work, as the former points to the practice of making money. Profitable ventures, as art can often be, imply creativity and a critical acumen not unlike the process of making art. This distinction within a gallery setting can seem tenuous, yet it's within the process of creating such parallels that criticality enters. Life becomes art, and it is here, within the domain of dreams and desires, personal journeys and processes, where questions are posed. The lack of segregation implicates our own role in the business of life, the things we consume and our associations with those desires. In one of his more well-known ongoing projects, Sarabia follows his grandfather's lifelong quest for Pancho Villa's buried treasure, believed to be somewhere in the mountains near Mazatlán. The quest is an inherited obsession that takes the L.A.- born artist back to Mexico, where he now resides, to look for the origins of a myth that has eluded him and his family. Narcoculture and the metaphoric lingo of black market economies mark the dangerous journey of the Pacific Discovery Group of the Americas (PDGA), a front created by the artist in order to fund his search for the treasure. PDGA certificates sold in his New York gallery authorize the purchaser to his or her share of the gold, if found. The presence of Jesús Malverde, the (unofficial) patron saint of drug traffickers, sculpted within an installation or represented in a video, is a plea for assistance as much as he is a stereotypical reliquary, and, like Malverde, Sarabia's search for gold is a myth born from fact. Sarabia knows well that as an Angeleno his journey within this ancestral narrative is both biographical as well as conceptual. The study paid to transnational exchanges of bodies, goods, and labor in his work echoes an indirect but parallel relationship to family as much as his own artistic practice. 200 EDUARDO SARABIA

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