Bio/CV
View CV as PDF

John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner who utilizes all and any media to engage in diverse cultural arenas through strategic revealing, tactical disruption, and symbolic wagon burning, His practice includes a range of new media, public art, installation, and performance focusing on the convergence of memory, social space and decolonization. Originally from Pomona, California he identifies as part of the mainly hybrid tribe of Mexitaliano Xicangringo Güeros called “Los Mixtupos” (mixt-up-oz).  Leaños' work has been shown at the Sundance 06 Film Festival, the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leaños is a Creative Capital Foundation Grantee and has been an artist in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies (2006), Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society (2003), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (2007). Leaños is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Practices and Community Arts at the California College of the Arts.

A Statement
The course of my work threads its way through the margins that separate truth and fiction, exerting stress on seemingly unyielding conventions that reside in the personal, social, and political realms. Through the surreptitious masking of objects, and/or pseudo-posturing of an anti-position, my work attempts to force ambiguity towards the surface in hope that those who come in contact with it will gravitate towards doubt, uncertainty, and skepticism. I am interested in work that raises questions of validity, veracity, and authenticity; however, I intend for these suspicions to ultimately migrate towards questions of the assumed power relations within issues identity, authority and "freedom." My work seduces the viewer into penetrating the barriers that surround personal identities so as to explore difference as an unstable cultural construct. I find that my work is happiest when it uses humor and/or beauty to ironically unveil its meaning.