For most of us, waiting in traffic can feel hellish, and a congested commute is merely a way to get from point A to point B.
The artist Jaime Muñoz, however, lingers in that space, distilling moments in busy lanes into reflections on Southern California. In his first solo museum exhibition, Jaime Muñoz: Truth Is a Moving Target, at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes through January 26, 2025, Muñoz shows us the intersections between working-class life, religious imagery, machines, and, of course, cars. A first-generation Chicano artist, Muñoz draws from his life, including working in structural concrete and temp warehouse labor, but especially from that quintessential Southern California experience: driving in traffic.
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“Everyone’s lives revolve around work and having a commute,” Muñoz tells me over the phone. “In terms of making art, I feel like that’s something that’s relatable to everyone, and that’s appealing to me.”
Truth Is a Moving Target features large-scale works made with acrylic, airbrush, glitter, and velvet flocking that evoke Los Angeles car culture and religious imagery. His multimedia work captures the visual languages that informed his youth and art practice: trips to the junkyard for car parts, Catholic paintings, pop culture.
In LA Commute (2019), the back of a Toyota pickup is framed by a white border with a geometric pattern in shades of green. The canvas is made up of oranges, yellows, greens, and blues, punctuated with glittering stars and white birds. The truck itself sports a sticker that reads “Jalisco,” next to images of farm animals. The back of the truck bed reads, simply, “Yo.” The face of the Aztec sun god, Huitzilopochtli, floats above it all, its rays bathing the vehicle with glittery resplendence.
Muñoz brings our attention back to the truck as a symbol, both on the freeway during a commute and as a vehicle for work. Muñoz created the term Toyoteriato describe the process of working on your pickup—the act of taking something apart and building something new using what you have around you.
“For Jaime Muñoz, telling the story from the perspective of laborers is not something that is ever heard,” says Karen Crews Hendon, LA Plaza’s director of exhibitions and senior curator. “It’s something that is experienced. And depending on your experience, there’s a lot of stereotyping that goes around that.”
For Truth Is a Moving Target, the curator wanted to show some of Muñoz’s processes; a vitrine displays the artist’s tools, including sketchbooks, inkpots, and paper cutouts, emphasizing that art is a form of highly skilled labor.
“He works like an architect. He does blueprints,” Hendon explains. “I mean, he really takes time to figure out what his composition is going to be before he even touches the canvas.”
Ink diagram drawings in the exhibition nod to automotive-repair manuals and Dada sketches that influenced Muñoz’s work. In one piece, the artist brings together a surreal image of Mickey Mouse, a car-manual drawing of a turn signal with exposed wires, and a “Toyoda” logo (a callback to the company’s original name). Muñoz’s footnotes tie together the threads between each component of the composition.
In automotive repair (and in some art practices), describing something as a Mickey Mouse job is an insult, denoting substandard or poorly executed work; through Mickey’s inclusion, Muñoz brings a newer, deeper meaning to the iconic cartoon mouse. Similarly, Muñoz writes about the term rasquache, which “has the same connotation but has been reclaimed to highlight the creativity and uniqueness of Chicano and Mexican working-class communities.” This may be a Mickey Mouse job, he seems to be saying, but it’s also a clever work-around.
A Mickey Mouse job might also be how we describe technological advancements in the labor force: In a capitalist society, many of us feel like Mickey in Fantasia, doing our best to keep up with an ever-increasing rush of brooms making fools of us. In some respects, technology has made our lives more efficient, but it has also harmed working folks who labor under inhumane conditions for unjust wages.
Despite these strong thematic elements, Muñoz resists any singular interpretation of his work. The cultural references of his work inevitably speak to Chicanx and Latinx communities, but the individual viewer’s perspective is also important to the artist.
“I feel like when you make work, the work is supposed to do the majority of the talking,” he says. “I don’t ever want my work to be prescriptive.… The function of art is so that the audience has their own personal space with the work.”•
Jaime Muñoz: Truth Is a Moving Target is on view at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes through January 26, 2025.
Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and creative non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her reviews, features, and profiles have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, KCET, the Guardian, Hyperallergic, Art21, Aperture, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Creative Independent, and more. She writes a monthly newsletter, Notes from Eva, that includes links to opportunities for creatives.
