At a young age Jorge Gomez del Campo moved with his family from Mexico City to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a small town founded for the production of the atomic bomb. The legacy of The Manhattan Project, and the legacy of the private corporations that later ran the privatized laboratories of Oak Ridge have all had a profound impact on Jorge’s work as an artist and thinker.         While most of his early life was spent in the U.S., and in many respects he grew up like any middle class American, in significant ways Jorge was always an outsider. There were very few Mexican families in East Tennessee at that time, and no real local Mexican-American culture for him to identify with. As a result he often shared the experiences of his peers without sharing the fundamental values and suppositions that they took for granted. Culturally speaking, he was inside and out all at once, while being alienated from his own heritage. Jorge’s place in the world was a dislocation.
        This sense was further embedded in Jorge as a young adult, when he was mandated to the care of the state as the result of a conflict with his immediate family. This ordeal, which included over a year of detentions, beating by police officers, and dehumanization in a state mental hospital also led Jorge to his first experiments with artistic production.
        Upon graduating high school, Jorge received a full four-year merit scholarship to Transylvania University, a small Liberal Arts college in Kentucky. There, early on, he experienced waves of discrimination, which included death threats and assaults, oddly enough, not at all related to his ethnicity, but rather to his personal politics, appearance, and writings in a local paper. If this intimidation had any lasting effect, it was to make Jorge more secure in his independence of thought and artistic production.
        Jorge spent a year studying in Paris where he developed a deep affection for Renaissance painting, North African and Arab neighborhoods, and perhaps most importantly, a fondness for contemporary Continental philosophy. Also while in Paris, Jorge experienced the disconnect between the world of images/ glamour/ celebrity and the world of flesh and blood people.
         Jorge graduated with honors from Transylvania University and went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. He left SFAI after one semester because he was unhappy with the lack of emphasis on theory, writing, and history. He then worked as a bouncer in San Francisco bars, and later as stagehand and electrician for movies, theatres, and the parties and events of the very rich.
        While in the Bay Area, Jorge lived in a number of “transitional” neighborhoods only to find that after they had transitioned, he could no longer afford to live there. The circumstance of living in poor neighborhoods while working directly for the wealthy elite made it impossible for Jorge to overlook the inherent violence of late capitalism. During this time he lived with the realities of the street (drugs, violence, rape and murder) side by side with the parties, excesses, and cultural artifacts of the ruling classes.
        Jorge continued to pursue artistic production in various mediums and with various underground groups until 2003 when he moved back to East Tennessee in order to take a step back from his usual life and develop a more cohesive body of work that speaks from his experience to the ideas that have occupied him all of these years.