Various Small Fires is elated to announce the opening of Sublunary, a group presentation in the main gallery of our Los Angeles location examining Southern California’s transcendent natural terrain and dynamic social ecology. The exhibition unites the works of five artists: Jackie Castillo, Mercedes Dorame, Lizette Hernández, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Lily Ramírez. Ranging from photography, painting, sculpture, and ceramics, their cross-disciplinary works express a kinship with regional topographies – subverting these spaces through color, medium, organic materials, and abstracted form. Sublunary explores the landscape as a liminal space between nature and culture – one altered by human and non-human migration, urban expansion, colonial histories, and our intrinsic sensitivity to the elemental aesthetics of the region.
Jackie Castillo’s photographic works investigate the architectural landscape and distinct cultural zeitgeist of working-class ascension in her hometown, Anaheim, California. Through a double exposure made on 120mm color-positive film, Castillo’s floor-bound cerulean work, Between no space of mine and no space of yours, presents two views from the sidewalk. “The image is merged onto foundation construction material and suggests two stairways moving past each other and the topographic rise of a new architecture through suburban vernacular—a broken down fence, topiaries, a garage door, a cinderblock wall, and electrical lines.” Her wall works, fabricated in collaboration with her father, conjure feelings of suburban familiarity – a rose, a shrub, and residential greenery become the focal points of her rebar-mounted cement portraiture, a nod to the shared cultural knowledge cultivated by day laborers over domestic landscapes.
Calling upon her Tongva ancestry, Mercedes Dorame employs sculptural installation and photography to compose visual portals and ceremonial interventions in the land.
