Andy Medina’s practice investigates language as a political, visual, and cultural structure through which power, identity, and knowledge are produced and interrogated. Working across painting, installation, printmaking, public interventions, and design, Medina approaches language not only as a system of communication but as a field shaped by colonial histories, racial hierarchies, and institutional exclusions.
Central to his work is an engagement with semiotics: signs, symbols, pictograms, and systems of visual orientation such as road signage are extracted, reconfigured, and displaced to expose how meaning is constructed and normalized. Drawing from both Mesoamerican visual traditions and contemporary Western systems, Medina creates hybrid visual languages that unsettle dominant narratives, exploring the balance and tension within language, and questioning who is granted legibility within them.
Medina’s practice is deeply rooted in the validation and care of Indigenous languages and knowledge systems, particularly those of Oaxaca. Through works engaging Zapotec, Mixe, and Mixtec languages, he confronts the racialized structures that define literacy, education, and cultural value in Mexico. Translation, public space, and vernacular materials become tools to foreground language as lived experience rather than abstract form. Painting functions in his practice as a site where language exceeds text, while installation and public interventions operate as spaces of confrontation and dialogue. Grounded in critical examination and lived experience, Medina’s work insists on complexity, plurality, and the right of marginalized identities and languages to occupy space, visibility, and meaning.