Guillermo Galindo
Braille Forensic Codex / Codex forense en braille, 2015
Acrylic ink on handmade paper
39 x 94 in.

Magnolia Editions’ 2015 publications by innovative and genre-defying composer, performer, visual and sound artist Guillermo Galindo incorporate artifacts found at the border between the United States and Mexico by Galindo and photographer Richard Misrach.

Galindo’s Flag works are printed directly onto a group of faded, weathered flags found at the border. Provided to the project by the humanitarian citizen organization Water Stations, these discarded flags were once used to indicate the presence of water tanks placed in the Calexico desert. Ominously empty boxes of bullets have been reproduced at an enlarged scale in his Ammo Boxes prints; likewise, Color Caravan’s background is a photograph of spent shell casings taken at the border by Misrach.

The surface of each image is traversed by one of Galindo’s signature musical scores, printed in a variety of unique systems of notation that recall the graphic scores of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Each work vibrates at its own distinctive visual frequency: where Voces Flag is crisply printed with straightforward, rebus-like instructions for a performance, Sarape Flag’s abstractions of line and color approach the playful improvisations of a Joan Miro painting.

Galindo’s practice often incorporates playable instruments he has fabricated from objects found at the border. Here, too, he uses the rhythms and patterns of music — as filtered through various inventive modes of visual representation – to elegantly summon a living history from that which has been discarded and forgotten.

– Nick Stone