The exhibition was very precise: a video and a couple of sculptures articulated a critique of gender impositions, the ominous role of the military in Mexican life, as well as the glamour and market appeal of authoritarian aesthetics.
The video perhaps articulated this best. A group of real soldiers perform marches and the classic movements of military parades in an empty, unidentifiable city lot. From afar, in their olive green costumes, they appear as the regular hyper-masculine, violent authority figures that drive around all over Mexico; from up close, they are as absurd as their grip over the country: their faces are covered in white funeral-like masks that hide their identities, they hold roses in their mouths, their hats grow to hang almost a foot over their foreheads and have a little fabric vagina for an insignia, their buttocks are exposed and they’re wearing frilly, red lingerie. Tellingly, they command a group of blind-folded men, the title alluding to the disposability, the ready-to-wear/use of those precarious bodies.
In the gallery space, the video was accompanied by a striking sculpture: three military figures, also garbed in Sánchez Kane’s subverted uniforms, held together by a golden flagpole going in and out of their asses and mouths. Out of their groins grew an erect medal, ending with a make-up compact bearing Sánchez Kane’s logo, a reference to the prevalence, the ready availability of patriarchal, nationalistic discourse, infiltrating everyone’s homes and minds like catalog products. The impaled soldiers’ golden faces were made out of a cast of the artist's own face, nodding to the role we play in the upholding of our authority figures. The ways in which the military uniform mirrors our own tendency to uniformity: high fashion, micro trends also work as identifiers and difference-markers, clothes as the very first layer through which we read and judge others and ourselves. The critique of authoritarian masculinity and the violence it entails, was completed by a nearby vacuum sealed uniform, perfectly folded flat —a neat comment on it's ready-to-wear-ness, how quickly we all accept authoritarian rule over our lives, but also on the sinister nature of that power, its links to dark money and money laundering.
