Semi-Learned Borrowings

Pete Hoffecker Mejía

March 1 - 30, 2025

In Semi-Learned Borrowings Hoffecker Mejía assembles discarded elements into unified but contrasting compositions. Aspects of commercial packaging, plastic, and wood scrap, sit next to welded steel, and laser cut plexiglass. The configurations borrow and contort modernist tropes, with a head nod to lineages of Latin American abstraction. Born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in the United States, the works are a meditation on belonging, difference, estrangement and hierarchies of representation

A 'Semi-Learned Borrowing' is a linguistic term for a word that is partially adapted from a classical language into a modern language. The word is changed to fit the phonology and typography of the language it is borrowed into. Semi-learned borrowings are reshaped based on sound changes in the language they are borrowed into, they are loanwords adopted from one language and used in another without translation.