Counterweight (2019) presents a two-color lithograph of industrial steel weights, objects Mendez encountered on Captiva Island during his residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2016. The work carries a quietly charged memorial dimension, conceived as a homage to Cuban artist Belkis Ayón, whose burial site Mendez sought but could not locate during a 2017 visit to Havana. That search led him through sites of commemoration, offering, and sacrifice, and the weight-bearing objects depicted here absorb that layered significance without announcing it. Printed in an edition of fifteen and signed by the artist, the lithograph was produced at Tamarind Institute, where Mendez incorporated a final screen layer into the printing process, a technique that subtly shifts the viewer's experience depending on proximity, the image opening and closing at different distances. Mendez, who is of Mexican and Colombian heritage and was born in the United States, moves across materials and cultural registers with sustained attention to questions of identity, geography, and the body, including its visibility, its absence, and its relationship to place and memory. His 2017 trip to Havana deepened these preoccupations. Invited through the MacArthur Foundation's International Connections initiative, he witnessed Santería ritual in Regla, a municipality steeped in spiritual history, where doors were locked to hold transforming spirits inside. Counterweight draws on all of this accumulated experience, turning a found industrial object into something more concentrated, a form that holds grief, displacement, and devotion in careful balance. Mendez's work is held in numerous institutional collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and has been exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Biennial, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, among others.