Hamiltonian Artists is pleased to present Edgar Reyes’s solo exhibition It Was Only a Dream. Inspired by his experience growing up undocumented in the DC area (locally referred to as the DMV) amid the sensationalization of organized crime in the early 2000s, Reyes’s new body of work teases at the blurred lines between Chicano masculinity, criminality, and cultural identity.

Abstracting images from his family archive and layering them with found Chicano relics, Reyes invites viewers into a geometric, pixelated dreamscape reminiscent of his boyhood. Through sculpture, installation, and prints on fabric, Reyes renders the complicated beauty of Mexican American identity and ideals, interrogating the conditions that have come to define them.

Situated in the haze of memory and media, It Was Only a Dream reflects the ways in which projection can warp perceptions and how nostalgia can distort the past.