Precious Cargo Precious Cargo Precious Cargo Precious Cargo Precious Cargo Precious Cargo Precious Cargo Precious Cargo  Precious Cargo Precious Cargo Precious Cargo  














we weren’t bored
Adán De La Garza
26 April – 23 September 2026

Precious Cargo is pleased to present we weren’t bored, an exhibition by Denver-based artist Adán De La Garza. The five channel video installation and accompanying artifacts chronicle an early 2000s Tucson world from the perspective of a group of teenage boys. The exhibition is joined by the release of a zine of the same name, featuring stills and text to supplement the videos, which were taken over the course of 6 years during De La Garza’s transition to young adulthood. The footage, which began out of a desire to film a skate video, transforms in its installation form into an unruly archive of a moment in time. It is the world according to the rowdy subcultural adolescents, evading parents and law enforcement, expending energy, attempting stunts, and giving meaning to their unscheduled hours through improvised performances of having guts and lighting shit on fire:

We would organize entire day-long events for ourselves to shoot, like finding water skis and pulling each other down a dirt road, road trips to Las Vegas, scoping spots to do car launches and donuts, throwing parties with the explicit goal of shooting footage, or building different potato guns to shoot at tube televisions and toilets found in the desert and eventually turning those into flame throwers. We also documented simple day-to-day interactions of a young subcultural person, mosh pits and fights at the local punk youth venue "Skrappys," interactions with adults and cops that hate skateboarders, and just shooting the shit, making each other laugh.   
In the gallery, a staggered arrangement of televisions and cinderblocks overlap into video assemblage. A receipt for the retrieval of the artist’s camera which was confiscated as evidence by Tucson PD hangs in the opposite end of the space, next to a skate deck featuring a portrait of the artist as a young ungovernable. As much as these objects and video sequences amount to a story of peer pressure and recklessness, they also tell a disjointed tale of comradery and bravery, and the way the pre-smart phone, post-9/11 adolescent generation explored intervention and alternative modes of being. 


De La Garza credits his role of filming these antics with providing him with a foundation for performance art, collaborative projects, and understanding the limits of the human body. The exhibition we weren’t bored represents a portion of a larger body of work by the artist which includes hours of video the artist shot with his friends between the ages of 16 and 22. The exhibition will be on display through summer 2026.
















//////////

Adán De La Garza is an artist, co-conspirator, curator/programmer, and recovering academic. Recent works have begun to examine the dire circumstances of late capitalism, the relationship between political and emotional stagnation, catharsis and protest, sonic warfare, and emerging futures brought about by climate change. Adán was a co-conspirator of the media arts exhibition series Nothing To See Here (2013-2016), is the sole member of the anonymous video screening series Collective Misnomer (2016 - present), smashes a lot of buttons putting on video game exhibitions with Dizzy Spell (2018 - present), and recently co founded the city wide video art biennial Denver Month Of Video (2023-present). Originally from Tucson Arizona, Adán is currently based in Denver, Colorado.

Precious Cargo is a slow gallery, distribution project, and small press based in Tucson, Arizona. This exhibition was supported in part by Night Bloom: Grants for Artists, through MOCA Tucson and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. 

////////

Precious Cargo
1804 S 4th Ave
Tucson, AZ
85719

Website
Instagram
Mailing List