The Latest

Exhibit to feature five emerging Los Angeles-based artists

bySignal Tribune
April 25, 2014
2 minute read
Total
0
Shares
0
0
0
The above image is a detail of an untitled solvent print on canvas by Miguel Angel Mejía, who was born in 1984 in Sinaloa, Mexico. He now lives and works in Southern California and is a graduate candidate at the Brooks Institute MFA program in Santa Barbara. He holds a bachelor's degree in multimedia production engineering from ULSA Noroeste in Ciudad Obregon, Mexico. He works in photography and interactive installations, addressing topics in Mexican politics, history and poverty.
The above image is a detail of an untitled solvent print on canvas by Miguel Angel Mejía, who was born in 1984 in Sinaloa, Mexico. He now lives and works in Southern California and is a graduate candidate at the Brooks Institute MFA program in Santa Barbara. He holds a bachelor’s degree in multimedia production engineering from ULSA Noroeste in Ciudad Obregon, Mexico. He works in photography and interactive installations, addressing topics in Mexican politics, history and poverty.
The Museum of Latin-American Art (MoLAA) and the Arts Council for Long Beach will open the exhibit Distant Parallels at The Collaborative, 421 W. Broadway, on Saturday, April 26, from 7pm to 9pm. Admission is free, and the exhibit will run through July 9, 2014.
Distant Parallels reflects upon the Latin-American diaspora through family-based investigation and broader cultural research, exploring topics of home, homeland, anonymity and representation in new works by five emerging Los Angeles-based artists.
Miguel Ángel Mejía draws parallels between life on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border in his documentation of child labor in urban areas. In his larger photographs, Mejía captures the desolate landscape of wastelands in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora and Riverside, California— images that, without a label, cannot be identified as existing in one country or another.
Adriana Baltazar presents a recorded online search of objects, remedies and myths as her grandmother describes them on a long-distance call from Michoacán, Mexico. Baltazar’s search leads to contemporary images connecting Michoacán’s longstanding indigenous culture with today’s organic food and health trends.
Personal history also informs the installation and selection of magazine-page paintings by Ramiro Gomez Jr. Using his own work experience in the service industry as reference, Gomez paints faceless maids, caretakers and gardeners directly over photographs of the pristine homes and spaces they maintain.
Exploring language, semantics and the desire to project meaning onto undeciphered glyphs, Gala Porras-Kim recreates an Olmec stone known as the Mojarra Stela. In the exhibition, visitors are invited to create a crayon rubbing directly over the stone and take away an impression of the stela’s surface.
Similarly, Luis Ernesto Zavala extracts pages and images from comic books, Mexican household products and neighborhood signage in order to fill them with new meanings. Subjects in his paintings are coded with brands and objects harvested from interchangeable experiences of his childhood in Mexico and his life in Los Angeles. Porras-Kim and Zavala explore new voids created by cultural diaspora— the ongoing movement of art and ideas across geopolitical boundaries.

For more information about the opening reception, call The Collaborative at (562) 590-9119.

Total
0
Shares
Share 0
Tweet 0
Pin it 0