Con/Safos

Con/Safos
rafa esparza

February 28, 2015 – January 9, 2016
The Bowtie Project

Con/Safos (C/S) by rafa esparza is a site-specific sculpture and year-long revolving installation at The Bowtie Project. Over the summer of 2014, esparza and his father handmade 1,500 adobe bricks on site as part of esparza’s performance building: a simulacrum of power. In a continued exploration of the site, esparza used these bricks to build two intersecting adobe walls. Throughout the course of a year, graffiti artists, painters, and sculptors are invited to design, paint, and build onto the surface of Con/Safos, on view for one month at a time.

The Los Angeles River has long been a contested site in many forms. As of 2008, the Los Angeles Graffiti Abatement Program resulted in the removal of much of the historic graffiti that lined the embankments and walls along the river. It erased not only a significant history of artistic production specific to Los Angeles, but with it, dislocated and disbanded a community whose primary creative forum was found along these banks. This collaboration is designed to highlight a history of displacement along the river and to provide an open sanctioned space for painters and graffiti artists to create temporal artworks.

In addition to creating a work for the wall, each artist will create a unique print produced in collaboration with Self Help Graphics & Art (SHGA), a popular and vital community resource for the creation and presentation of Chicano/Mexicano art and culture in East LA. SHGA will invite each participating artist to partake in their Atelier Program where they will print a limited edition serigraphic print inspired by their work at C/S. SHGA will also be conducting onsite experiments creating dyes from native plants to use in printing, thus producing their first ever site-specific edition and infusing each print with the feeling and life of the Los Angeles River.

INSTALLATIONS
Sarah Dougherty & Iris Yirei Hu: February 28 – March 31, 2015
Leo Limón & Roach: May 3 – May 31, 2015
Timo Fahler & Vyal: June 28  – July 31, 2015
Maricón Collective & Juan Manuel Gudiño: September 20 – October 19, 2015
Mariel Capanna & HOODsisters: December 6, 2015 – January 9, 2016

ABOUT THE ARTIST
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 narrative, and kinship. His work is often inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that result from it. Using live performance as his main mode 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 historically significant narratives and social spaces. Recently, esparza has initiated experimental collaborative projects that are grounded in laboring with land, specifically, adobe — a labor and skillset inherited from his father, Ramon Esparza. In these projects, the artist shares institutional space and resources with invited Brown and Queer artists and cultural producers. esparza is invested in working in the local geographies of his hometown and those of the Southwest, including Mexico and Latin-America.

SUPPORT
Funding for this project is provided via the support of an Indiegogo fundraising campaign. A portion of paint supplies for Con/Safos was provided by Home Depot and Shilpark Paint, through ExchangeWorks.