For Harold Mendez, time is both a tool and a material. Drawing upon the complex narratives of his Mexican and Colombian heritage, Mendez sources photography and found objects from archives, public spaces, and sites of commemoration to create compositions that unearth and monumentalize forgotten histories.



As the inaugural artist in Rice Public Art’s Off the Wall series, Mendez’s site-speicific Field (Encounter) (2019) is drawn from the Keystone Mast Collection, a photographic archive of 350,000 stereoscopic photographs that documented the world between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Evoking the skips on a film reel or the slips of a double exposure, breaks between each panel fracture a seamless image into moments of repetitive visibility.



Rice Public Art’s new Off the Wall series commissions a site-specific installation by a recent alumnus or alumna of the Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art. Each installation is on view for one year on the south wall of the Raymond and Susan Brochstein Pavilion, a modern structure designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners that houses a popular campus café. A new commission will be featured each year for three years.



This program is made possible by Raymond and Susan Brochstein, Deborah Brochstein and Steven Hecht.