Photography from the Southwest borderlands on view in San Antonio

Presa House Gallery in San Antonio presents two solo exhibitions bringing collectively Tucson-based photographer Marcus Xavier Chormicle and Dallas-based photographer Raul Rodriguez. Both artists develop pictures past documentation, utilizing it to excavate reminiscence throughout the borderlands of the Southwest.

Rooted in private archive and regional historical past, their practices study how pictures carry the burden of household lineage, labor, migration, and inherited narratives. Moving between documentary impulse and materials intervention, they place the {photograph} as greater than a file; it turns into a website the place personal reminiscence and public historical past converge.

The opening reception will happen on Saturday, March 7, from 7:00–11:00 PM, with each artists in attendance. The exhibitions will stay on view by appointment via April 18, 2026.

About the Artists

Marcus Xavier Chormicle (b. 1997) is a lens-based artist from Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a lineal descendant of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. Working throughout pictures, collage, land-based set up, artist books, and efficiency, his observe facilities on grief, generational cycles of systemic violence, and the layered histories of the Southwestern United States.

Chormicle continuously returns to the household archive as each topic and technique. Drawing from his background in journalism, he treats pictures as a temporal bridge, an entry level via which private reminiscence intersects with broader histories of displacement, resistance, and survival. Expanding upon vernacular types such because the scrapbook, the funerary photograph montage, and the home portrait wall, he reframes intimate household narratives inside the bigger legacy of violence enacted towards Indigenous peoples, Chicanos, and Nuevomexicanos within the area.

Chormicle is at the moment an MFA graduate scholar within the Photography, Video, and Imaging program at the University of Arizona. He is a recipient of the 2025 US Latinx Artist Fellowship. In 2020, he acquired his BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University.

Raul Rodriguez (b. 1988) works with pictures and multimedia processes to look at cultural reminiscence, place, and human resilience. As a first-generation Mexican American raised in Texas, his research-driven observe constructs layered narratives that intertwine private historical past with broader regional and political histories of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.

In initiatives similar to Tracing Bracero Legacies, Rodriguez revisits the ignored histories of the Bracero Program (1942–1964), a labor settlement that contracted over 4 million Mexican nationals to work within the United States. Drawing from archival imagery and oral histories, he etches historic pictures onto material and situates them inside modern landscapes, creating tactile and visible connections between previous and current. By photographing residing Braceros and the Rio Vista Farm processing heart in El Paso, he positions reminiscence towards the West Texas terrain—highlighting each aspiration and endurance inside methods of labor and migration.

Across his broader physique of labor, Rodriguez investigates what persists regardless of erasure. Through portraiture, panorama, gesture, and materials intervention, he challenges colonial amnesia and the mythologies of Texas identification, blurring the boundaries between documentation and constructed narrative. Photography turns into not solely a recording system, however a way of reimagining how reminiscence, time, and identification flow into throughout generations.

Rodriguez is at the moment the Education Coordinator on the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX. He acquired his BFA from the University of North Texas in 2014 and his MFA from Texas Christian University in 2020. Rodriguez can also be the founding father of Deep Red Press, which focuses on underrepresented and photo-based artists in Texas.