2026
What returns
Chavis Mármol
Chavis Mármol brings familiar objects into unfamiliar relationships. A mechanical bull becomes an atomic bomb. A Cold War image of space exploration becomes an illuminated billboard. Objects that arrive carrying their own histories collide with others, allowing Mármol to compress broad ideas of power, masculinity, conquest, technology, violence, and entertainment into a few carefully constructed objects.
For Strange Love, Mármol replaced the fiberglass body of a mechanical bull with a life-size reconstruction of Little Boy, the atomic bomb used by the United States against Hiroshima in 1945. The idea existed before he arrived at Artpace, but the residency provided the time, space, resources, and context to realize it. Through a close friend, we located a used mechanical bull in Laredo, Texas, and Mármol stripped it down to the mechanism that would become the foundation for the work.
Mármol initially planned to fabricate parts of the bomb through 3D printing at his studio in Mexico City, where he and a team of ten studio assistants carry out much of the physical production of his work. Instead, using a small model of Little Boy as reference, he constructed it entirely by hand in the Artpace workshop from wood, cardboard tubing, foam, and fiberglass. Growing up in Hidalgo, Mexico, Mármol learned woodworking, welding, and airbrushing while helping build caskets in his grandmother’s funeral home. His vast material knowledge has since allowed him to fabricate work for numerous artists in addition to his own. At Artpace, he spent hours sanding, smoothing, fitting, and painting the bomb before stenciling “MRML 026” across its surface like a military identification code and his artist signature. On its tail he spray-painted a much less formal message: “Hi.”
Behind it, Mármol constructed a monumental illuminated billboard using an image from the 1959 book Man’s Reach into Space. Printed in sections, wheat-pasted across its surface, and distressed, the billboard recalls the layers of poster advertisements pasted throughout Mexico City. Published during the Cold War and emerging space race, the original image belongs to a moment when outer space was increasingly imagined as another territory to be explored, competed over, and conquered.
The cowboy and the astronaut might appear to occupy different worlds, but both emerge from fantasies of the frontier. In Texas, those worlds collide in the same geography. Cowboy culture remains central to the state’s mythology while aerospace, defense, and AI technology industries increasingly shape its economy and its visions of the future. The rocket, mechanical bull, and bomb collapse those histories together. Masculinity remains embedded within them as well: in the cowboy, the weapon, the rocket, and the absurd performance of mounting a nuclear bomb and attempting to ride it.
Mármol titled the exhibition after Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Before arriving in San Antonio, he read Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert, which became the basis for Kubrick’s film. What Mármol recognized in these Cold War narratives was not simply history. Military escalation, political fearmongering, technological competition, and performances of masculine power continue to reorganize themselves around the present.
The atomic bomb fundamentally changed the scale at which people could imagine their own destruction, but generations nevertheless learned to live beneath its threat. The bomb did not need to fall again to exercise power. The possibility was enough. Mármol became increasingly interested in what happens when fear becomes permanent, sustaining military industries, political authority, technological competition, and systems of control.
The bomb doesn’t fall. But it doesn’t disappear.
Neither does Mármol allow it to remain only an object of fear. Thirty bales of hay surrounded the base of the mechanical apparatus in the gallery, transforming it into something resembling a rodeo attraction. A vintage lamp, red telephone, and desk housed its controller and extended the installation’s Cold War atmosphere.
At the opening, “The Bomb Run” from Dr. Strangelove played as visitors entered. Mármol began the performance dancing to Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” before climbing onto Little Boy while I took my place behind the controller. As I operated the mechanism, Mármol rode the bomb to Edwin Starr’s “War” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” The performance concluded with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.”
An object modeled after a weapon of mass destruction had become entertainment. The absurdity of the spectacle did not erase the violence of the object at its center. Little Boy remained Little Boy even as people gathered around it, listened to music, and applauded as Mármol rode the bomb with confidence and showmanship.
Mármol is not interested in pretending that the violence carried by these histories has disappeared. He is equally resistant to the belief that recognizing their return requires surrendering to fear. Previous generations also lived through war, political turmoil, nuclear threat, and repeated declarations of impending catastrophe. They continued to form relationships, raise families, build communities, make things, and imagine futures.
The technologies change. The personalities change. The frontier moves. Military escalation returns. Fear returns. Performances of masculine power return. The desire for conquest returns.
And still, so do we.