Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL)  is excited to announce our next exhibition, Third Terrain. This exhibition includes artists Federico Cuatlacuatl, Emilio Rojas, and Martín Wannam, whose lives and practices traverse North America, cultivating a transnational understanding of landscape. Through critical performance and speculative world-building, the exhibition centers decolonial ethics rooted in ancestral knowledge, liberation, and justice for migrant and diasporic communities. The artists imagine a third terrain as a layered, relational site where histories collide and futures can be reimagined. The exhibition will run September 12 to October 11, 2025 at our gallery located in The Lofts of Greenville and Monaghan Mill. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, September 12th from 6-8 pm.

Third Terrain inhabits two exhibition locations in two different South Carolina cities; the Richardson Family Museum at Wofford College, Spartanburg, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Greenville. Adopting the structure of theater, each exhibition venue contains a distinct “act.” Act I, housed in the museum, interrogates monuments not as fixed structures, but as contested sites of power that can be challenged or dismantled. Act II, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, envisions new landscapes emerging from the shadows of history, projecting indigenous practice beyond the present. Across both acts, Third Terrain unfolds a multiplicity of timelines: ancestral, historical, and speculative, that are entangled in the ongoing struggle for decolonial futurity. The exhibition is curated by members Michael Webster, Kiley Brandt, and Michael Borowski. 

Federico Cuatlacuatl is an artist born in San Francisco Coapan, Cholula, Puebla, Mexico.  Federico's work is invested in disseminating topics of Nahua indigenous immigration, social art practice, and cultural sustainability. Building from his own experience growing up as an undocumented immigrant and previously holding DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Federico’s creative practice centers on the intersectionality of indigeneity and immigration under a pressing Anthropocene.  At the core of his most recent research and artistic production is the intersection of transborder indigeneity, migrant indigenous diasporas, and Nahua futurisms.  Federico’s independent productions have been screened in various national and international film festivals as well as exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. As founder and director of the Rasquache Artist Residency in Puebla, Mexico, he actively stays involved in socially engaged works and binational endeavors.

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments.

His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions such as The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, SECCA, the Syracuse University Museum of Art, The Johnson Museum of Art and The Botin Foundation. From 2019-2022 Rojas was a Visiting Artist in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York. He has taught in the M.F.A. programs at Parsons the New School and the low-res M.F.A. programs at PNCA in Portland, Oregon, and University of the Arts, in Philadelphia. He is currently a visiting full-time professor at Cornell University in the School of Art, Architecture and Planning. His traveling survey exhibition Tracing A Wound Through My Body  accompanied with a bilingual catalogue, is currently exhibited in its third iteration at the Usdan Gallery at Bennington College in Vermont, to continue  at SECCA, North Carolina, and Artspace, New Haven. 

Martín Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) is a visual artist and educator whose work critically examines Guatemalan's historical, social, and political climate, focusing on freedom dreaming for the cuir individual. He focuses on the intersection of brownness and cuir utopia that uses the foundation of iconoclasm and the aesthetic of maximalism through the tools of photography, sculpture, and performance for the constant evaluation of systematic structures such as religion, coloniality, folklore, and white supremacy.

He received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in Spring 2020, a Diploma in Contemporary photography from La Fototeca (GT) in 2016, and their BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar (GT) in 2015. Wannam has exhibited nationally and internationally, including various group and solo shows in Guatemala, The United States, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Korea. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of the Fronteristxs Collective, a collective of artist fighting for migrant justice and the abolition of the prison industrial complex.