In not never over nothing Fidencio Fifield-Perez offers layered reflections on migration and the absurdities at the heart of state apparatuses of documentation. Working across painting, collagraphy, weaving, and collage, Fifield-Perez transforms materials associated with bureaucracy into intimate records of belonging. These forms stem from the evidentiary demands of immigration processes, where proving one’s existence becomes both an administrative requirement and a deeply personal act. Across the presentation, recurring motifs stand in for networks of solidarity and the slow work of self-making under constraint. Whether through delicately rendered still lifes or intricately woven paper structures, Fifield-Perez renders visible the tension between institutional legibility and the truth of lived experience.

Surge (2014-25) conjures echoes of individuals who are forced to exist as data. Made of intricate layers of personal documentation, maps, and newspaper, collagraphed and dematerialized, these forms coalesce into the shape of individuals who crossed the U.S.–Mexico border during the migration “surge” in the latter half of President Obama’s second term. The form is reminiscent of the wave at the heart of this media metaphor and is fixed in place with bright red pins resembling place markers when tracking deceased migrants. The people who emerge from this form are sketched out of the evidence of their existence. This evidence is strictly empirical: where they are from, how many of them came, and where they died. Out of these raw biopolitical facts it becomes difficult to imagine individuals with lives, loved ones, friends, and hobbies. Their individuality is stripped by the other surge, that of information. The grid-like forms and patterns begin to resemble the web architectures and surveillance networks that impassively monitors these people during some of the most harrowing moments of their lives.

These grids quilt the border itself, turning the disassembled map into a fabric of interwoven and complex perspectives from those who cross it. In Cross Stitch, a fence-like grid serves as a substrate for a woven map. Unlike the impersonal and systematic maps used in Surge, this map is taken directly from the notebook of a former Border Patrol agent, who shared it with Fifield-Perez. The hand-drawn map’s seeming impartiality stands in dissonance with the actual lives of those on opposing sides of an arbitrary divide. It depicts the area that Fifield-Perez had crossed as a young boy. This distinction between a cold objectivity and a surreal lived experience creates an uneasy tension that feels perpetually unresolved.

In response to the absurdism at the heart of governmental documentation, Fifield-Perez responded to these grids and abstractions with an older tradition: that of petate weaving. These intricate works resemble woven textiles, composed typically of fine blue and white lines that form repeating motifs like diamonds, teardrops, plants, and even text. Their rhythmic, grid-like structure evokes traditional weavings, blending both Indigenous and colonial weaving traditions. One lineage preserves pre-Hispanic forms, while the other stems from Spanish-introduced shapes such as handled baskets and devotional palm weavings.

In what can be seen as the culmination of many of these meditations on place and self, Fifield-Perez reflects in a painterly manner on the aesthetics of administration in a series called dacaments. Each work in the series depicts a single potted plant—rendered with care on envelopes—materials from the bureaucratic processes required to prove his existence. The series emerged when, as part of applying for DACA, Fifield-Perez was advised to begin documenting his life in minute detail. During this period, friends and family began giving him plants, gestures of care that quickly filled his domestic space. Here, the plants are more than still lifes: they index intimacy, solidarity, and the Kafka-esque nature of having to prove one’s existence through paperwork. Tenderly painted, they become proxy self-portraits and witnesses to a life unfolding between vulnerability and normalcy. As a whole, dacaments transforms the demand for legibility into a tender resistance through accumulation, relation, and form.

Fifield-Perez’s work lays bare the absurdity of a system that demands individuals become their own archivist: requiring proof of their existence through the very materials that erase their complexity. In navigating these demands, he reveals how the state’s impersonal gaze can become personal, shaping how one sees and records oneself. And yet, within this enforced archival impulse, Fifield-Perez articulates moments of care and connection. His adaptations of bureaucratic materials are not simply acts of compliance but of transformation—infusing cold forms with gestures of tenderness and memory. In embracing this paradox, Fifield-Perez turns administrative farce into something sustaining, finding a quiet and persistent form of grounding.

—William Hernandez Luege

Fidencio Fifield-Perez (b. 1990, Oaxaca; lives and works in Davis) received an MFA from University of Iowa (2015) and a BFA from Memphis College of Art (2013). Selected solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis (2025, 2023); Commonwealth and Council, Mexico City (2024); Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville (2021); Quincy Art Center (2022); Craft Alliance Center of Art + Design, St. Louis (2019). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Galveston Artist Residency (2023); Cleveland Museum of Art (2020); International Print Center New York (2020); The Luminary, St. Louis (2019); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2019). Fifield-Perez has participated in residencies at Crosstown Arts, Memphis (2022); Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville (2021); Salina Art Center (2020); Ox-Bow, Saugatuck (2019); and The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams (2019).

Fifield-Perez’s work is in the collections of Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw; Cleveland Museum of Art; Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan; Minia University, Cairo; Le Bonheur, Memphis; and University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal.