rafa esparza: for you and the sky
rafa esparza: for you and the sky
with Sage Gaspar, Sebastian Hernandez, Casmali Lopez, Alberto Lule, and DeAnna Ramirez
SBCC Atkinson Gallery
Residency: September 5-October, 2017
Exhibit: October 6-December 1, 2017
A Conversation with rafa esparza
Sarah Cunningham (SC), Atkinson Gallery Director: So, rafa, I’d love to know more about the roots of this project, how this started and why you even came to the use of adobe in your artistic practice.
rafa esparza (RE): I started making adobe not thinking about using it as an art form, but as a way to reconnect with my father knowing he made bricks when he was a teenager in Durango, Mexico. I sought him out for guidance regarding how he thought about home when he was young, but also because there was a rift in our relationship after I came out to my family and to my community. So, I was thinking about it as a way to rekindle our friendship that I really missed. My father and I hadn’t, until then, had much of a communicative, conversational kind of relationship.
SC: It’s interesting that you’re making an object together and that is the conversation. A visual language, rather than a spoken language.
RE: Yes, and it’s something that is true in my family and true for other first generation Latino artists who are introducing art to their families, that we don’t talk about art, necessarily. My own practice that I invest a lot of time in hadn’t, until then, been of great interest to them. It’s just something that we don’t traditionally do, going to galleries or museums. I feel like making these objects in adobe is sort of a language that they understand, one that I inherited directly from them, and it’s like a breaking point for those conversations to begin.
SC: I’m curious about the way that adobe has, historically and in your own practice, this very layered set of meanings from these personal engagements with your father and collaborators to broader sets of political and social questions. The material itself, the dirt, captures a number of really compelling ideas that are central to your work. Can you talk about the dirt and its land-ness?
RE: When I first started thinking about adobe in my artistic practice, I was thinking about a way to presence land on top of Michael Parker’s The Unfinished obelisk carved into the earth beside the Los Angeles River. Also, it was a way for me to learn about how my father worked with land to shape bricks. A way to think about how labor was being referenced through this ancient monument and a way to think about my family as a laboring unit that produced the 1,400 adobe bricks to pave the surface of that sculpture. When my father led the production of that project there was a repositioning with each other because my father had to step into being a teacher as opposed this patriarch that just points and makes things happen.
Working with adobe is, for me, working with land. These adobe bricks are a way of presence-ing not only ideas about land, but also about memory and race. Over the summer, I started to make relationships between this sort of laborious practice with my more intimate performance-based work. Thinking about my body and space and the history of my brown queer body in traditional arts spaces and thinking about the history of land…the history of land in the US and the history of labor in the US, as well.
SC: The team you worked with in Marfa was intentionally a group of queer persons of color and, now, here at SBCC, you’re working primarily with students, and, another thing that is different about the project here at SBCC is that the residency is open to the public. You’re quite literally performing the labor for the public. How does that affect your thinking about it?
RE: The group that we’re working with here feels very special. I mean we all, in our minds, are tethered to these different institutions. Some being the industrial prison complex, some being institutions of higher learning, whether we spent time in them, or have families that have. These tethers are like weaving, a matrix of relationships coming up in the conversation, just through working together on this project.
When I invited queer people of color to be part of the core working unit in Marfa, that happened because I noticed how heavily the presence of family was weighing in on how people received the work, but also how it was impacting me directly. I am very family oriented, but not only to my biological family. Being a queer person, it’s been important to foster relationships with other queer folks and to have family outside of my biological family that is supportive. I value that family equally.
Over the last four years, there has been a division of labor where the folks that made the bricks weren’t working with the bricks after they are made. I saw the work very much functioning in phases. There was the phase where the bricks were being produced and it was important…the bonds and the relationships that were being made, but, it remained pretty invisible, the details of how these bonds were formed and, at times, even the folks who participated in that process. This last year, I’ve been intentional about diminishing that division and started to invite the people I’ve been making the adobe bricks with to also participate in the creative process directly with the artists. Here, a few things are different: The folks that I’m making with the adobe bricks are the artists.
SC: That is an important next step in the evolution of your work, where there is actually no division between the brick makers and the artists who will be exhibited in the space.
RE: The open studio aspect of this project is also very generative. I can’t think of any other time I’ve had an opportunity to contextualize the work for students and that kind of access has always been important to me. That’s why I’m such an avid social media user (@elrafaesparza). I like to make the work accessible to folks that probably wouldn’t consider coming into a gallery or a museum, and to be able to give them background, maybe a background that they might be able to relate to, or just give them extra information to think about this work.
SC: When we initially discussed this project, you were very interested in making work specifically here in Santa Barbara. Why?
RE: When I was working along the Los Angeles River, I did research about how the river was used while Los Angeles was being settled. One of the things I learned is that adobe bricks were made alongside the river and those bricks were involuntarily made by the Tongva people to build the San Gabriel Mission. So, I started researching other missions, re-learning the history about them. I remembered taking a fieldtrip to the Santa Barbara Mission in the 4th grade as part of a full year of learning about California history and the mission system. As I re-learned, I heard that Ricardo Bracho has been rewriting the curriculum for how the California mission system is taught. It feels timely to do this project precisely as the state has adopted a revised curriculum.
I see this as contested land. All land that we walk on, that we live on, in the US is stolen land. Stepping onto the gallery patio and realizing that the Santa Barbara Mission is in clear view from where we’re working is even more impactful. In close proximity to this contested site where indigenous slave labor was used to make the bricks to build the Mission, we’re now working consensually and collectively with the same material to build a space where we can imagine different structures and narratives.
SC: So many 4th graders went on that tour and went home and made a replica of the Mission. A rite of passage where we honor this colonial history through the making of an object. Here, you’re using dirt, the adobe, the very practice that was used to build the mission, but you’re also looking to the materials used to build these dioramas, cardboard and foam core. They seem oppositional in some way, adding to your effort to challenge the education system, here, at a college, on Chumash land. This is Chumash land.
RE: Yes, this is Chumash land. All of those things are very significant. In terms of the material, cardboard and dirt are disposable materials, but also they’re still used by a lot of people around the world to make their dwellings, people live in earth houses and also cardboard boxes. So, the work recharges the materials. Working with the materiality of how these histories have been taught is a way of re-appropriating these materials to imagine different spaces that we feel are significant and want to highlight. We’re thinking about other monumental and historical structures that exist in Mexico, in Central America, South America, all over the Americas, but we’re also thinking about the homes that we live in now. We are also thinking about structures that don’t exist yet. We’re imagining a landscape without any development.
SC: You are working in this practice of land art that has a historical practice. Who are you looking at in terms of other artists who are working with land or have worked with land?
RE: I look at a lot of my peers. It’s been really important for me to take initiative and be in conversations, not only through studio visits, but actually through the making and the thinking and the creating of works together with my peers. In Los Angeles, there is such a vibrant community of performance artists from Taisha Paggett to E.J. Hill, and Dorian Wood, and my sister, Sebastian Hernandez, who is here working with us.
ASCO, the performance art collective from East L.A., has also been very seminal to my way of thinking. Ana Mendieta is another person whose work I’m always thinking about and looking towards. I’m also looking at Postcommodity’s work.
SC: One of the things that I hear through every part of this conversation is the building of community, building of family, building of the ongoing dialogue. As we manifest this project, I am looking forward to being in what I’ve heard you describe as a place of brown matter inside the white cube of the gallery. What kind of conversations do you hope will happen in this brown space that you’re creating here at SBCC?
RE: I hope that people will be thinking about how this place could be different, how this space made up of brown matter makes a difference in the way we enter a gallery. I would love for people to have just the experience of being surrounded by this much earth, which is really uncommon in cities built up like Santa Barbara and cities built up like Los Angeles. I hope that people can see themselves reflected and be able to have conversations about their bodies in space, their bodies in different spaces, and how different architectures function, and how different architectures impact us. I hope we can host a paper bag lunch conversation like the one I was able to join about gender in the quad a couple of days ago. That felt like a generative way of gathering folks and having a conversation.
SC: So, you see it as a place that’s open if people want to come schedule events—either formal or casual—during the exhibit?
RE: Yes!
rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. esparza has performed in a variety of spaces including AIDS Project Los Angeles, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, SOMArts, Vincent Price Museum, LACE and various public sites throughout Los Angeles. He is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Most recently, his work was included in the Made in L.A. 2016 exhibit at the UCLA Hammer Museum and the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York and tierra. sangre. oro at Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, TX.
Sarah Cunningham (SC), Atkinson Gallery Director: So, rafa, I’d love to know more about the roots of this project, how this started and why you even came to the use of adobe in your artistic practice.
rafa esparza (RE): I started making adobe not thinking about using it as an art form, but as a way to reconnect with my father knowing he made bricks when he was a teenager in Durango, Mexico. I sought him out for guidance regarding how he thought about home when he was young, but also because there was a rift in our relationship after I came out to my family and to my community. So, I was thinking about it as a way to rekindle our friendship that I really missed. My father and I hadn’t, until then, had much of a communicative, conversational kind of relationship.
SC: It’s interesting that you’re making an object together and that is the conversation. A visual language, rather than a spoken language.
RE: Yes, and it’s something that is true in my family and true for other first generation Latino artists who are introducing art to their families, that we don’t talk about art, necessarily. My own practice that I invest a lot of time in hadn’t, until then, been of great interest to them. It’s just something that we don’t traditionally do, going to galleries or museums. I feel like making these objects in adobe is sort of a language that they understand, one that I inherited directly from them, and it’s like a breaking point for those conversations to begin.
SC: I’m curious about the way that adobe has, historically and in your own practice, this very layered set of meanings from these personal engagements with your father and collaborators to broader sets of political and social questions. The material itself, the dirt, captures a number of really compelling ideas that are central to your work. Can you talk about the dirt and its land-ness?
RE: When I first started thinking about adobe in my artistic practice, I was thinking about a way to presence land on top of Michael Parker’s The Unfinished obelisk carved into the earth beside the Los Angeles River. Also, it was a way for me to learn about how my father worked with land to shape bricks. A way to think about how labor was being referenced through this ancient monument and a way to think about my family as a laboring unit that produced the 1,400 adobe bricks to pave the surface of that sculpture. When my father led the production of that project there was a repositioning with each other because my father had to step into being a teacher as opposed this patriarch that just points and makes things happen.
Working with adobe is, for me, working with land. These adobe bricks are a way of presence-ing not only ideas about land, but also about memory and race. Over the summer, I started to make relationships between this sort of laborious practice with my more intimate performance-based work. Thinking about my body and space and the history of my brown queer body in traditional arts spaces and thinking about the history of land…the history of land in the US and the history of labor in the US, as well.
SC: The team you worked with in Marfa was intentionally a group of queer persons of color and, now, here at SBCC, you’re working primarily with students, and, another thing that is different about the project here at SBCC is that the residency is open to the public. You’re quite literally performing the labor for the public. How does that affect your thinking about it?
RE: The group that we’re working with here feels very special. I mean we all, in our minds, are tethered to these different institutions. Some being the industrial prison complex, some being institutions of higher learning, whether we spent time in them, or have families that have. These tethers are like weaving, a matrix of relationships coming up in the conversation, just through working together on this project.
When I invited queer people of color to be part of the core working unit in Marfa, that happened because I noticed how heavily the presence of family was weighing in on how people received the work, but also how it was impacting me directly. I am very family oriented, but not only to my biological family. Being a queer person, it’s been important to foster relationships with other queer folks and to have family outside of my biological family that is supportive. I value that family equally.
Over the last four years, there has been a division of labor where the folks that made the bricks weren’t working with the bricks after they are made. I saw the work very much functioning in phases. There was the phase where the bricks were being produced and it was important…the bonds and the relationships that were being made, but, it remained pretty invisible, the details of how these bonds were formed and, at times, even the folks who participated in that process. This last year, I’ve been intentional about diminishing that division and started to invite the people I’ve been making the adobe bricks with to also participate in the creative process directly with the artists. Here, a few things are different: The folks that I’m making with the adobe bricks are the artists.
SC: That is an important next step in the evolution of your work, where there is actually no division between the brick makers and the artists who will be exhibited in the space.
RE: The open studio aspect of this project is also very generative. I can’t think of any other time I’ve had an opportunity to contextualize the work for students and that kind of access has always been important to me. That’s why I’m such an avid social media user (@elrafaesparza). I like to make the work accessible to folks that probably wouldn’t consider coming into a gallery or a museum, and to be able to give them background, maybe a background that they might be able to relate to, or just give them extra information to think about this work.
SC: When we initially discussed this project, you were very interested in making work specifically here in Santa Barbara. Why?
RE: When I was working along the Los Angeles River, I did research about how the river was used while Los Angeles was being settled. One of the things I learned is that adobe bricks were made alongside the river and those bricks were involuntarily made by the Tongva people to build the San Gabriel Mission. So, I started researching other missions, re-learning the history about them. I remembered taking a fieldtrip to the Santa Barbara Mission in the 4th grade as part of a full year of learning about California history and the mission system. As I re-learned, I heard that Ricardo Bracho has been rewriting the curriculum for how the California mission system is taught. It feels timely to do this project precisely as the state has adopted a revised curriculum.
I see this as contested land. All land that we walk on, that we live on, in the US is stolen land. Stepping onto the gallery patio and realizing that the Santa Barbara Mission is in clear view from where we’re working is even more impactful. In close proximity to this contested site where indigenous slave labor was used to make the bricks to build the Mission, we’re now working consensually and collectively with the same material to build a space where we can imagine different structures and narratives.
SC: So many 4th graders went on that tour and went home and made a replica of the Mission. A rite of passage where we honor this colonial history through the making of an object. Here, you’re using dirt, the adobe, the very practice that was used to build the mission, but you’re also looking to the materials used to build these dioramas, cardboard and foam core. They seem oppositional in some way, adding to your effort to challenge the education system, here, at a college, on Chumash land. This is Chumash land.
RE: Yes, this is Chumash land. All of those things are very significant. In terms of the material, cardboard and dirt are disposable materials, but also they’re still used by a lot of people around the world to make their dwellings, people live in earth houses and also cardboard boxes. So, the work recharges the materials. Working with the materiality of how these histories have been taught is a way of re-appropriating these materials to imagine different spaces that we feel are significant and want to highlight. We’re thinking about other monumental and historical structures that exist in Mexico, in Central America, South America, all over the Americas, but we’re also thinking about the homes that we live in now. We are also thinking about structures that don’t exist yet. We’re imagining a landscape without any development.
SC: You are working in this practice of land art that has a historical practice. Who are you looking at in terms of other artists who are working with land or have worked with land?
RE: I look at a lot of my peers. It’s been really important for me to take initiative and be in conversations, not only through studio visits, but actually through the making and the thinking and the creating of works together with my peers. In Los Angeles, there is such a vibrant community of performance artists from Taisha Paggett to E.J. Hill, and Dorian Wood, and my sister, Sebastian Hernandez, who is here working with us.
ASCO, the performance art collective from East L.A., has also been very seminal to my way of thinking. Ana Mendieta is another person whose work I’m always thinking about and looking towards. I’m also looking at Postcommodity’s work.
SC: One of the things that I hear through every part of this conversation is the building of community, building of family, building of the ongoing dialogue. As we manifest this project, I am looking forward to being in what I’ve heard you describe as a place of brown matter inside the white cube of the gallery. What kind of conversations do you hope will happen in this brown space that you’re creating here at SBCC?
RE: I hope that people will be thinking about how this place could be different, how this space made up of brown matter makes a difference in the way we enter a gallery. I would love for people to have just the experience of being surrounded by this much earth, which is really uncommon in cities built up like Santa Barbara and cities built up like Los Angeles. I hope that people can see themselves reflected and be able to have conversations about their bodies in space, their bodies in different spaces, and how different architectures function, and how different architectures impact us. I hope we can host a paper bag lunch conversation like the one I was able to join about gender in the quad a couple of days ago. That felt like a generative way of gathering folks and having a conversation.
SC: So, you see it as a place that’s open if people want to come schedule events—either formal or casual—during the exhibit?
RE: Yes!
rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. esparza has performed in a variety of spaces including AIDS Project Los Angeles, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, SOMArts, Vincent Price Museum, LACE and various public sites throughout Los Angeles. He is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Most recently, his work was included in the Made in L.A. 2016 exhibit at the UCLA Hammer Museum and the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York and tierra. sangre. oro at Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, TX.
