Elmer Guevara // Mi Orgullo
January 21st - March 6th, 2021
In Mi Orgullo, Guevara’s body of work honors and accounts his parent’s homeland experiences of civil war in 1980s El Salvador and the struggles they endured migrating and adapting to Los Angeles culture. Weaved within these experiences is his own personal narrative - prideful recollections of both the fond memories and wounds of his upbringing in Los Angeles. Guevara’s visual reconstruction of these narratives helps him both understand the distress that has shaped his parent’s being, while also illuminating the dimensions of his own identity that have been shaped by inherited trauma. The figures he portrays serve as vessels holding the complexities of memory - from El Salvador to Los Angeles.
Guevara’s use of portraiture work exemplifies his upbringing within its storied images. He manipulates the imagery within the figures by reconstructing past memories and merging them with his current experiences. In addition, family identity plays a major role in the work as he renders both the interior and exterior spaces to address the environments of origin and partly by analogy. Guevara also depicts psychological spaces that interweave from one concept to another, expressing different realities.
One challenge Guevara faced while creating Mi Orgullo was to visually express this body of work while also acknowledging and working through his inherited trauma. This tension drives him to expand the use of multiple depictive modes to illuminate the complexity of the subject matter. He composes figures with a variety of approaches, in some instances portions hold collaged graphic images and along with painterly modes that collide with one another. The images in the collaged areas derive from numerous family picture books and screen-shot images from video clips forming two distinct worlds. The collaged element within the body gives one version of information in one particular style that is in contrast to rendered paintings and drier marks.
Installation Images
Installation Images by Elon Schoenholz
About the Artist
Elmer Guevara
Elmer Guevara (b.1990) was born and raised in Los Angeles and is currently working bicoastal in New York City. In the 1980s, his parents fled a civil war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with the city exposure in South Central and the culture his parents brought to the US with them, he became inspired to depict images about his upbringing and exploration of identity. Furthermore, he depicts observations of encountered struggles from his own and neighboring immigrant families, who dealt with issues of marginalization and inequality. Through his teenage years he met with friends, commuting throughout the city on public transit becoming obsessed with exploring the city’s crevices and buildings while favoring the late nights to paint on walls and highways. Without much thought, this obsession later ventured into an appreciation for painting and an education in the arts. In 2017, he received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Cal State University Long Beach and is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College in New York. He has recently exhibited with Residency Art Gallery at The Felix Art Fair this past year in Los Angeles and took part at Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia for A Very Anxious Feeling, group show.
Gallery Annex Project
About the artist
Josh Vasquez is a multi-disciplinary artist who primarily works in painting. He was born and raised in the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles. In addition to his paintings, he explores different media such as drawing, performance, video, and most recently large scale sculptures. He studied and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis on drawing and painting from California State University of Long Beach in 2017. He has recently shown at Montevista Projects, Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, South Los Angeles Contemporary, and the Torrance Art museum.
About the project
My current work utilizes painting and installation to create imagery that captures the essence of my home in Los Angeles. I am interested in ideas about idealization, nostalgia, romanticism, and access. I use familiar Los Angeles motifs such as sunsets, palm trees, and architectural accents, such as iron window bars, in my work to depict an intimate portrait of where I live. I use construction motifs and structures to accentuate and bring attention to the space. Moreover, these structures also help me explore ideas about access. More specifically, access to the inside and outside of the home. I ask myself questions like, “Who is allowed in our home? Are we keeping ourselves in or are we keeping others out?”
