Skinchangers: Begotten of my Flesh is the exhibition catalog that accompanies Rubén Ulises Rodríguez Montoya's first solo museum exhibition, which took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa). Skinchangers weaves the story of a vampire forced to reconstitute its body from space debris following the destruction of the last spaceship leaving an apocalypse-ravaged Earth. Sculpted from detritus and discarded materials scavenged from the US-Mexico border, Rodríguez Montoya's artworks are shape-shifting creatures that feed off each other.
Rubén Ulises Rodríguez Montoya (born 1989 in Parral. Chihuahua) is an artist based in Mexico City. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. He creates sculptures that are fantastic beings centered around self-made mythologies and social issues concerning border culture, abjection, adaptation, and mestizaje. Rodríguez Montoya's practice is influenced by Speculative Fiction, Nahualismo, Sci-Fi, and the labor of his family. His work hybridizes and creates parallels between land, human, and animal as a way to investigate the process in which violence eradicates, erases, and erodes communities of color.
Edited by Lauren Leving.
Foreword by Megan Lykins Reich.
Contributions by Rubén Ulises Rodríguez
Montoya, Lauren Leving, Marco Antonio Flores, Octavio Gómez Rivero, Laura G. Gutiérrez, Christal Pérez, Rossen Ventzislavov.
