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. Her hanging iridescent sculpture, Meeting You Between Worlds: Abalone Bridge - Aapoo Naamkomochot, IV, was produced in commission for the Getty Center’s inaugural Rotunda Commission, examining abalone’s vital role in the subsistence of California Native people. The mollusk functioned aesthetically in regalia and as part of ceremony, as well as a food source and material to produce fish hooks. Dorame recalls a question posed by a tribal elder in response to tribal borders, “where does someone’s territory end and ours begin? Look at an abalone shell and tell me where the pink ends and where the green begins.” Her photographic works Algae Portal - Shooxar Tukuupar andImprint - Xamee-evet I equally address absence and liminal space, as she applies a subtle alchemy to capture ephemeral gateways between the earth’s contours; shifting the viewer's perspective to unearth landscapes just beyond visibility.
Los Angeles-based artist Lizette Hernández works intuitively with clay, found glass, and organic materials to form lustrous sculptural works investigating sacred objects and their relationship to the terrestrial world. Her practice engages with elements of deep ecology – exploring the intersections of floral anatomies, religious iconography, and the ritual practices of remembrance. In her works, Deshaciendo and Pasando, Hernández reflects on the mystery and the sacredness of the land by approaching her medium as a living object. She sculpts in union with the Raku-fired clay, leaving delicate imprints on the material, allowing its memory to naturally permeate in the way "water escapes land forming dry cracks on the earth." As her Raku sculptures are not sealed with a cold finish, Hernández considers them still with life, suspended in transmutation as the glaze oxidizes the surface.
Esteban Ramón Pérez, a skilled upholster and trained painter, draws from a distinct cultural archive to produce transgressive works engaged in postmodernist discourse, materiality, spirituality, and sociopolitical histories. He employs salvaged leather as his medium of choice, constructing luxurious hanging tapestries and hand-made framed works that subvert traditional notions of painted composition. Pérez’s large-scale wall-work, Los Alacranes, depicts an imagined Mexican landscape, loosely mapping his grandmother’s migration from Durango to Sinaloa through an abstracted mosaic of reconstituted organic leather material. Pérez’s work embodies elements of rasquache aesthetics through his resourcefulness, adornment, and embroidery; a method of art-making rooted in Chicano tradition, coined academically by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto. In tender homage to the livelihood from which his materials are derived, Pérez prefers to work with flawed leather remnants, noting their scars and wrinkles as an allegory of an authentic life.
In Men Dig Those LA freeways, Lily Ramírez maneuvers procedural, cartographic marks and feathery strokes to produce an abstracted tapestry of Los Angeles’ highways, rivers, and cityscape; reflecting on the expanding urban infrastructure through which her father aspired upward mobility. Ramirez begins with geographical surveys of Southern California through Thomas Guide maps passed down by her father. Parsing memory and nostalgia, she pours over these guides, weaving the region’s graticules and intersections into the fiber of her canvas, revealing cerebral maps of spaces once inhabited, leaving her own thick, vigorously layered, monochromatic impressions. Her vibrant oil stick compositions on kozo paper zoom in on these coordinates and, through her emboldened experimentations with color and texture, offer an intimate counterpoint to the source material’s empirical perspective.
Curated by Kelley Camberos
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Jackie Castillo (b. 1990, Orange, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in sculpture, installation, and film photography. Her practice is rooted in examining the isolation and anxiety felt by working class by investigating the relationship between infrastructure, urban development, and collective memory. Utilizing the visual vernacular of surface, material, and ruins, she examines how an internalized loss of identity may render the self as unreal, estranged, and in various states of invisibility. Her research has largely focused on the history of land development in Southern California since the late 19th century and its vast, yet violent relationship with the cultural and material landscapes that have existed in this region for hundreds of years. Her work has been exhibited at The California Museum, Sacramento, CA (2023); The Long Beach Museum of Art, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA (2023) Broad Art Center, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); As-is Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024); The Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Park View/Paul Soto Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2020); and the Material Art Fair in Mexico City, MX (2022). Castillo’s work has been acquired by The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection (2023). She was awarded the Individual Artist Fellowship by the California Arts Council (2021).
Mercedes Dorame (b. 1980, Los Angeles, California) is a multi-disciplinary artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction and ancestral connection to land and sky. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. Dorame received her BA from University of California, Los Angeles (2003) and MFA from San Francisco Art Institute (2010). Her work has been exhibited at the Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University (2016); Thatcher Gallery, San Francisco (2015); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California (2014); Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, Berkeley (2012); California Indian Conference, Chico (2011); and Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco (2010), among others. She is a recipient of the James D. Phelan Award in the Visual Arts from the San Francisco Foundation (2017), En Foco’s New Works Photography Fellowship (2012), and Harpo Foundation Fellowship (2011).
Dorame’s work is in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Triton Museum, among others. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from organizations such as Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Loop Artist Residency, the James Phelan Award for California born visual artists, and from the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA Studies.
She is currently regular faculty at CalArts in the Photo Media Program, and was commissioned by the Getty for her sculptural installation Woosha’aaxre Yaangaro as the inaugural Rotunda Commission. Her work is also on view in the Borderlands exhibition at the Huntington Library. Her work and story were recently explored in the Los Angeles Times article “How artist Mercedes Dorame shares pieces of her Tongva heritage across L.A.’s public landscapes”, and she was honored by UCLA as part of the centennial initiative “UCLA: Our Stories Our Impact” as an outstanding alumni working in equal justice over the last 100 years. She has shown her work internationally. Dorame lives and works in Malibu, CA.
Lizette Hernández (b. 1992, Los Angeles, California) is a first-generation Mexican-American artist primarily working in sculpture. Through a collaboration with clay, she is led by listening to the landscape and investigates expressions of inheritance and regeneration. Hernández questions the concept of “the sacred,” and explores the ideology of deep ecology by highlighting the intersections of floral anatomies, religious iconography and ritual practices of remembrance. Her process welcomes experimentation by use of plant matter with Raku firing and fusing other elements such as recycled glass. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. Her work has been exhibited at Harkawik, Los Angeles, CA (2022); april april, Brooklyn, NY (2024); Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); PTT Space, Taipei City, Taiwan (2023); Charles Moffett, New York, NY (2023); Night Club, Minneapolis, MN (2022); Good Mother Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Murmurs, Los Angeles, CA (2022); New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Fortnight Institute, New York, NY (2022); Muzeo Museum & Culture Center, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Blumenfield Projects, Kyoto, Japan (2022); Emilio Donde No.10, Mexico City, MX (2021); Mercado Negro, Guadalajara, MX (2018); House of Seiko, San Francisco, CA (2023); Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA (2023); The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2019); and Slow Culture, Los Angeles, CA (2016). Hernández lives and works in Los Angeles.
Esteban Ramón Pérez’s (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) practice utilizes his experience as a professional upholsterer and intertwines cultural and artistic sensibilities of his Chicano heritage with the visual language of postmodernism as well as issues rooted in postcolonial history, embodying facets of art histories, subjectivity, spirituality, and social issues. He received his MFA from Yale University (2019) and BFA from CalArts (2016). Pérez’s first solo institutional exhibition, Distorted Myths, opened at Staniar Gallery, Washington & Lee University, Lexington, VA (2022). He recently exhibited new work at the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A.: Acts of Living (2023). His work is in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Pérez had his first international solo exhibition at Galleria Poggiali, Milan, Italy (2024) and his work has been presented at Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2022); Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, NY (2024); James Cohan, New York, NY (2021); Calderón Ruiz Gallery, New York, NY (2021); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA (2022); and Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, CA (2023). Pérez was a recipient of the prestigious NXTHVN Fellowship (2020-2021) and the Artadia Los Angeles Grant (2022). Pérez lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Lily Ramírez’s (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) painting practice has always hinged on her fascination with the paint. She began working in acrylics at a young age, experimenting alongside her father who supported her burgeoning practice. The pair travelled across the US, living briefly in Montana and Wyoming before re-settling in L.A. Ramirez’s sumptuous paintings explore the physical limits of her chosen medium. Through richly textured surfaces and repetitive, methodical marks, the artist injects a playful vitality into her compositions, with paint strokes eking out the abstracted shapes of dangling tendrils in her backyard or the weaving lines of rivers, highways, and borders. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Otis College of Art and Design (2013), studying under artists Meg Cranston, Scott Grieger, and Soo Kim. Her work has been exhibited at Simchowitz, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Jac Forbes Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Mrs Gallery, Maspeth, NY (2023); The Brand Library and Arts Center, Glendale, CA (2022); The Lodge LA, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Art Share LA, Los Angeles, CA (2021); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Post Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Also Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2018); and ARA Arts Center Seoul, Korea (2017). Ramírez lives and works in Los Angeles.