John Doomdoom

My name is John Doomdoom. I’m forty-five, and I live and work in Mexico City. I was born outside Detroit, where the factory hum felt like the world’s natural rhythm, and at eighteen I moved to Oaxaca to study woodcarving and search for my own material. Later I entered the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, choosing sculpture and mixed media because I’ve always loved how a charcoal drawing can turn into the volume of concrete or bronze. I work with things that have carried weight and time: rusted metal, basalt, fragments of structures—out of them come forms about resilience against decay. Many of my series begin with quick charcoal maps that I translate into cast modules; I assemble them into large, six-meter pieces where visitors can rotate an element or change the tension of cables and feel the mass. The palette in my paintings is restrained—ochres, graphite, the turquoise of copper patina—I look for quiet inside rough surfaces. I’ve shown at ZONA MACO and Material, had solo exhibitions at Galería Juárez, and received a FONCA grant for a project turning construction waste into street furniture. Barragán and Chillida are touchstones for me, along with Mexican brutalism and the garage culture of my childhood. I keep an archive of textures—photographs of doors, scorch marks on cacti, the shadows of rebar—and new works grow from that archive. Right now I’m preparing “Desgaste” in Puebla, an exhibition about the beauty of wear. I live in Coyoacán, and my studio is on the roof; at night we pour metal and listen to the city cool.