Location, location, location... this famous phrase has a lot of meaning in the real estate market.   For Alejandro Mendoza, a refugee of Castro’s Cuba, location has another meaning.  “Location today means everything,” says Mendoza.   And he means it.  Since fleeing Castro’s shores, first to Mexico and then to Miami, he has been forced to deal with this concept of location again and again.  The highly valued freedoms of the free world are relative to location and access.  “ Constantly in our path we have to recalculate our location.  It has meaning for culture, color, race, language, intellect, money, power and, of course, art,” says the optimist Mendoza.  “Everybody dreams of a dream location because location has become a great goal in our life.  It is a socially empty concept and speculative.  It is one of the must radical modern concepts as a sign and symbol in today’s society.”

In this dynamic new body of work, Mendoza creates a non-existent topographic world, a world that alludes to land, trees, houses and geographic references.  It is a fanciful world that is non-specific and undefined on a map yet constantly creating a sense of location.  He poetically reveals, in an elegantly abstract language, the truths and myths of “Location.”  One stands in front of his objects and gets a sense of their location as they define their own borders; and yet, one feels the optimism of this artist searching for a sense of place, still questing a location.  This new work suggests maps and boundaries and tools for determining these concepts.  The truth of any map has always been the desired treasure of its maker.  The oldest map known to man was a map produced in Egypt showing the location of dolomite, a stone needed to carve other stones for the production of tombs and temples.  A meteorologist might present a map of wind currents or cloud patterns; a real estate developer would demonstrate a choice piece of land in relation to a prospective customer base.  What can one expect from a refugee poet/sculptor?  The cherished land of artistic freedom freed from boundaries determined by politics and economics, free from the limitations of the material world yet realized in a marvelous material form.  We journey here with Alejandro to a land not yet known but clearly visible to this artist’s eye.  As the land just over Jordan was referred to as the land of milk and honey, he allows us this moment to peer with him into the artistic mist and dream of a location free from limits, open to all and owned by no man.