Guillermo Gómez-Peña's performances—audacious spectacles inspired by religious ritual, S&M culture, experimental theater, and pop culture—release buried racist thoughts and investigate psychic wounds. In a career that has spanned NAFTA, 9/11, and the emergence of post-9/11 America, he continues to steadfastly mine the incendiary arena of confrontation and catharsis.

This interview took place in the kitchen of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on a July day near the end of the run of Andrea Bowers’s exhibition "The Political Landscape." The show consisted of two large projects and a suite of small drawings. The first project, which one encountered upon entering the gallery, was No Olvidado (Not Forgotten), a mural-like drawing consisting of 23 ten-foot-high panels that listed the names of people who have died in the attempt to cross the Mexican-American border. The second was a single-channel video projection, The United States v. Tim DeChristopher, which examines DeChristopher’s disruption of a government auction of wilderness land for oil and gas exploration.