OF FLAMES AND SHADOWS GONE ASTRAY at Bermudez Projects, Los Angeles
OF FLAMES AND SHADOWS GONE ASTRAY
March 9 – April 6, 2024
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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Bermudez Projects presents as its first show of 2024, Of Flames and Shadows Gone Astray, a group show serving as a multifaceted, cathartic confessional of love, loss, and perseverance.
In what is perhaps the most personal exhibition of the gallerist’s career, Julian Bermudez departs from conventional curatorship, and instead brings together deeply-resonant artworks as a means of addressing the challenges of his own life.
“In the last four years, I have experienced tremendous loss. Loss of love, family, friends, and home. Working through this has been a years-long process, resulting in my need for curating this show in order to fully grieve and heal,” says Bermudez. “This also allows me to push and expand the ways I approach the art of storytelling through curation.”
Through a range of mixed-media work — each incorporating fire as a
material — the exhibition touches on our shared experiences of overcoming some of the darkest moments of life; reaffirming our enkindled spirit to thrive in the face of adversity. Impermanence, resilience, loss, and rebirth are explored through each artists’ work, inciting a deeper inspection and introspection of our personal and shared existence. The exhibition aims to leave viewers with a greater appreciation for triumph over tragedy; strength through sorrow; and healing after heartbreak.
Of Flames and Shadows Gone Astray features the works of contemporary artists Francesca Bifulco, Malado Francine, Bryan David Griffith, and Cody Norris.
Bifulco’s striking sculpture, Their Wings Banging and Burning (2023) is a masterful centerpiece to the exhibition. At surprisingly five-feet tall, the burned wood, metal, and found palm cortex stands as a wounded monolith rising from its strewn ring of charcoal crowned at its base.
“I look at this piece as the anatomical dissection of resilience. It’s this vertical body that tolerates the intersections of tough-flexible, external-internal, downward-upward, and below-aboveground,” says Bifulco. “As if you’re witnessing both the wound and the healing at the same time.”
Cody Norris’ painting of twin palm trees breaking through charred earth is a literal and figurative expression of rising again after defeat. Cast in somber hues of grey, violet, and brown, the artwork presents its own scars after having been purposely set on fire by Norris.
What compels Norris to make sense of loss – and what comes of it – by scorching the surfaces of his paintings, extends beyond a fascination with fire. The driving force behind his poignant, atmospheric paintings of endangered landscapes is questioning what gets lost along the way of life.
Bryan David Griffith’s mixed-media works from his Rethinking Fire series explores the issues behind catastrophic wildfires, from past land management practices to climate change. Each piece is created by burning and/or salvaging materials from fire sites. Griffith’s works of smoke accumulated in encaustic beeswax on panel, and petroleum smoke accumulated on paper gleam with a healing, ethereal glow.
Of all the artworks in this show, Malado Francine’s paintings were not initially intended to have a specific association with burning, per se. Although there are some visual elements of “fire” appearing within her painting, Throne, or within the alchemical symbolism of her Lotto Mandalas — their partially charred and missing sections speak to the loss she experienced only a month ago.
Despite the misfortune of that recent blaze in her home and studio, the artist was able to salvage some of her work. As a result, six paintings will be presented in the aftermath of that inferno as an example of the deep resilience we carry as artists and humans, in picking up after disaster, and moving forward with grace.
Of Flames and Shadows Gone Astray does not point to, or illustrate anything specific that has happened in the gallerist’s life. Instead, it uses artworks in lieu of words, like a song or poem to tackle far-encompassing subject matter.
“Each of these artworks speak to universal themes that many of us have faced, or will face, at some point in our life,” concludes Bermudez. “It is truly important that I share my own experiences – however veiled – with audiences in the hopes of turning a painful past into a hopeful future.”
September 9–October 7, 2023
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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How do you reclaim history? Use the very means that spread the historical lies in the first place! In a new show at Bermudez Projects, South Central LA native Delano Dunn does just that for America’s fraught history of discrimination against Blacks.
In The Fiddle, Dunn’s debut Los Angeles solo show, the artist takes Black memorabilia, Afro-Americana, and blackface collectibles produced in the U.S. from the 1900s-1950s and, in over a dozen mixed media collages, upends the narrative.
“While that memorabilia came in many forms, from kitchenware to toys and to decor, this work primarily focuses on the pictorial representation of Blacks in postcards depicting glorified scenes of slave life – many of which included happy notes from one friend to another: ‘Thought you’d enjoy this lovely scene!’ – and advertisements for products using Blacks in the most egregious stereotypes and tropes,” says Dunn, who now lives and works in Chicago.
“Collage allows me to combine seemingly disparate imagery, colors, textures and patterns to bring historical images into a new context, one that may not even exist–a fantasy land where body parts repeat or are removed altogether, where scale distorts, where young Black girls now tower over another being,” says Dunn.
To add more texture, Dunn brought in the work of “the father of the American cartoon,” Thomas Nast, the prolific illustrator whose work was seen across America in newspapers and magazines in the second half of the 1800s. Nast created the Republican elephant and the modern image of Santa Claus, and helped create White America’s vision of itself.
Dunn says combining Black memorabilia with Nast’s imagery is meant to show a conflicted America with no clear line drawn as to the fate of Blacks in this country. Paired together, the postcards and the Nast illustrations provide a blueprint for the revisionism we see occurring now of the factual narrative of slavery in America. Within Dunn’s reworked Black Americana, the figures are sealed into their new world, seen only between the punctures of the tar-like shoe polish angrily scattered across the canvas. In this world, they now have the power to decide their own fate.
Collecting the Black Americana source material brought its own challenges. As he sourced these items, amassing a disturbing collection in his home, Dunn says he was repeatedly jarred by the way the sellers described them, calling slave scenes, for instance, “sweet, wonderful, lovely, adorable” … the same infantilizing language used to debase African-Americans from the start. “Many times, a bidding war ensued online, and I wondered who else was collecting these items, and why,” says Dunn.
Gallerist Julian Bermudez says, “I’ve been enthralled by Delano’s work for a few years now, and am delighted to be able to bring him and his work to Los Angeles, and to give his message the attention it deserves.”
ENRIQUE CASTREJON at Bermudez Projects, Los Angeles
ENRIQUE CASTREJON
Mind Heart Rectum
September 11–October 30, 2021
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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With six monumental body sculptures, Enrique Castrejon’s new exhibit “Mind Heart Rectum” puts the Bermudez Projects art gallery in Cypress Park at the crossroads of the human response to cancer, aging, masculinity, and the pandemic.
Yes, it’s a startling title, but Castrejon is trying to direct our attention to our minds, bodies, and souls. The CalARTs grad, whose work has been shown internationally, fills the main gallery with works he says helped him get through the continued decline of his father’s health due to dementia, heart disease, and rectal cancer. The feeling of helplessness and uncertainty Castrejon felt was processed through these works to understand these diseases and come to terms with their debilitating progression. In addition, the anxiety and the unexpected Covid infection of his older sister only propelled Castrejon into his work to ease the stress and uncertainty of this infection during this dark period of time.
“I don’t think I could have made it through that period without those pictures,” he says. “The pictures are about measurement and measurement is my form of control.”
For Castrejon, measurement is the act of assigning numbers to phenomena according to a rule. And much of his work gives us data surrounding and filling-in familiar representations, until the data almost obliterates the form.
Castrejon says his work usually begins with a found design: “Images of beauty, queer bodies, HIV, war, death, destruction, and tragic events,” taken from magazines, newspapers, art catalogues and online sources, and then broken into smaller identifiable geometric shapes. Castrejon says:
“I write measurements or other definable data or units along the side of the shapes to question and describe what I see from the parts of the whole.” And in doing so, “I challenge our perceptions of what is real, forcing us to think critically about information that is constantly changing, bombarding our everyday lives through images selected in directed advertisements, pop-culture sources, editorials and news stories.”
Each body sculpture in “Mind Heart Rectum” is measured in inches and calculated angle degrees; and each length along these fragmented geometric shapes is measured in (x inches) and all angles are measured in calculated angle degrees. With the use of a protector and calculator, Castrejon uses the equation (360°- x°=y°) to uncover the outside angels of each shape accordingly. And, then he uses thin black strips of paper as line indicators that help draw out those units outside the bodies creating a chaotic web or aura made from a rational quantitative process. Measured units are written at the ends of these black strips of paper allowing the viewer to come closer to the bodies, explore the bodies, and find the units’ point of origin within the body. Finally, the bodies are covered with strips of researched data and information concerning dementia, heart disease, and rectal cancer.
Castrejon describes his artistic goal as “ordered chaos.” The artist finds that even the kind of tragic event that words sometimes fail to describe can still be measured by art, and his methodical approach allows him to represent the difficult imagery of disaster, war, and chaos in an analytical manner.
As a senior research coordinator at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center – where he works with researchers studying the effects of drug use on the immune systems of sexually active Black and Latinx men – Castrejon has long explored HIV/AIDS and sexuality. But this new body of work hits closer to home.
“Mind Heart Rectum” examines Castrejon’s personal reaction to the dementia, heart disease, and rectal cancer that afflicts his Mexican immigrant father. As a caregiver for his father along with his mother and sisters, Castrejon saw how the diseases changed his father’s body and mind, and he believes by creating these works and making the private public, we can inspire people to learn more about their bodies and chronic illness, and help them talk about it without stigma.
The massive sculptures – the largest being 9 feet tall – are intentionally created to represent young bodies. Painted in varying hues of brown and black to represent Black and Latinx men, Castrejon wants to re-enforce that his father’s illness did not just appear due to his old age but through contributing factors and behaviors in his younger years. Like so many other men, including many Latinos, his father didn’t want to admit he was in pain, and wouldn’t seek medical care. Making it worse were language barriers, financial concerns, lack of awareness to these illnesses, and a lack of prevention messages.
Castrejon says, “I hope “Mind Heart Rectum” can be a positive experience that encourages introspection and reflection, and uncovers a silver lining in loss.”
Enrique Castrejon (b. 1972) was born in Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena; and earned his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has been displayed in venues including the LA Municipal Art Gallery; the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City; Museo de las Artes in Guadalajara, Mexico; and the Preview Art Fair in Berlin. He is the recipient of a COLA 2019 individual fellowship grant from the City of Los Angeles. Castrejon’s works are held in private and public collections, including the AltaMed Art Collection, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
KAMARIA SHEPHERD at Bermudez Projects | NELA/Cypress Park, Los Angeles
PROJECT SPACE:
KAMARIA SHEPHERD
She Learned Herself Awake
July 10–August 28, 2021
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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Bermudez Projects is pleased to present Kamaria Shepherd | She Learned Herself Awake, the second exhibit in the gallery’s new series of installation-based exhibits dedicated solely to BIPOC + LGBTQIA artists.
Composed with layers of fabric, plastic, small paintings on paper, and small sculptures, “She Learned Herself Awake” explores the myriad facets of self, identity, and emergence. Within this site-specific installation, fabrics digitally printed from photographs of the artist and by the artist, as well as from photographs of the artist’s paintings, Shepherd creates a deeply intimate space that is both engaging and eluding.
The “she” which exists in the space of the artwork is the artist. However, the artist’s image is used as either a symbol or repetitive print of a black woman.
Shepherd says, “Using this self-portrait as a motif addresses an often singular and one-dimensional stereotype of black womanhood in the United States. This universal “she” is being slowly awakened through the mediation of self and photograph, painting and installation, and artist and audience.”
Kamaria Shepherd’s (b. 1991, USA) artwork subtly touches on issues of identity, memory, race, culture, womanhood, and femininity as an African American woman in the United States. Paintings, prints, sculpture, video, poetry, and installations vacillate between minimal and excess; bold and subtle; loud and intimate. Shepherd writes about her work and the thoughts surrounding the processes, resulting in a hybrid of poetry/personal narrative/short story. In using found materials – clothing, bath rugs, pearl earrings – the artist gives citation to the “presence of a body, a female, and domesticity.”
Shepherd says, “I make paintings as objects, sculptures, or painted sculptural paintings. My sculptural paintings are called play-doh’s and are installed in ways where they make connections or conversations with each other while representing their own distinct personalities, like the parts of a person.” This approach allows individual works to be displayed singularly, as a whole thought; or grouped together in an installation, conversing. “[It’s] like a second-grader ready to present for show-and-tell. They perform.”
Shepherd earned a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Painting/Drawing from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her works have been included in group and solo exhibits throughout the United States. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
She Learned Herself Awake is the second exhibit in the gallery’s new series of installation-based exhibits dedicated solely to BIPOC + LGBTQIA artists. Funding is provided by the Bermudez Projects Exhibitions Fund and Bermudez Projects Collectors.
LETICIA MALDONADO at Bermudez Projects | NELA/Cypress Park, Los Angeles
LETICIA MALDONADO
Autonoetic
July 10–August 28, 2021
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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Why does Leticia Maldonado work in neon?
Maybe it’s because of the pizzazz of Vegas, where Maldonado grew up. “My mom was a cocktail waitress whose shift finished at 3am. Even on school nights, my stepdad would wake me up and we’d go get her. We’d drive right down the Strip in the middle of the night, and I’d look at the beautiful signs for The Dunes, The Tropicana, The Flamingo, and The Stardust. It was a giant, glamorous, electric fantasy land.”
But Maldonado’s works aren’t garish signs; they’re organic shapes — a rose, a moon, the female form — and finely wrought. Maybe that’s because she also spent a lot of her childhood with her grandmother in Fresno, learning to share her love of gardening, watching life “exploding out of the ground.”
Memory, flora, and pizzazz combine in Maldonado’s new exhibit at Bermudez Projects, “Autonoetic.” The dictionary says autonoetic is our ability to place ourselves and our thoughts in the past or the future. Maldonado says, “I think a better description would be sentimental objects that represent ways to track and keep time.”
Think of a rose pressed between the pages of a book.
For this exhibit, Maldonado has transformed this concept into a collection of 7 neon and neon-based works, each holding a unique story or memory.
A set of three “flower bouquets” refer to significant places in Maldonado’s life: Sullivan’s Island, NC; Paradise, NV; and LA’s Highland Park neighborhood.
The three “Starlings,” a non-connected triptych, poignantly speak to stages of existence. They also refer to the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. Each “Starling” serves as a repository for energy, saved to be engaged in future perspectives — a precipice, an archway, and a gate.
Maldonado’s self-portrait, “Just a Moment, Let Me Get My Things” offers us an opportunity to get closer to the artist through symbolic objects touching on unique facets of her life — a neon trumpet, an ace card, and more.
Maldonado says, “In my artwork I try to process the different layers of the human condition as woven through all of the different layers of personal worlds, by finding the threads of emotion and beauty that unite us and inspire compassion and empathy. My visual language for this expression is guided by the violent elegance and honesty of nature.”
Maldonado’s art studies began in figurative drawing, but she was pulled inexorably toward the glimmer and glister of neon. First, she learned the basics of creating patterns and design from neon art pioneer Lili Lakich; then the crucial skill of glass bending with neon master Michael Flechtner.
Her first serious complete neon work was a horror-comic inspired logo (she was originally interested in illustrating comics) for a local punk rock band called “The Misfits.” Since then, the work of her life has been to encourage a connection with herself, she says, through use of imagination and “creative destruction.”
Some of that destruction is inevitable, because, to achieve as much detail as possible, Maldonado chooses to work with the smallest diameter glass she can get. Her glass-bending colleague and friend Meryl Pataky says that her highly demanding work with 5mm diameter tubing is so precise that it’s “kinda crazy.” Neon tubing is usually 8-15mm in diameter. Patacky also notes that Maldonado uses unusual gases, like argon and krypton, to fill the tubes, making it even more exceptional.
“Autonoetic” lands at Bermudez Projects after an especially busy year for Maldonado. Tens of thousands of mask-wearing Angelenos saw one of her most ambitious pieces to date, “Unconcealed,” at LA downtown’s FIGat7th shopping center from February to May, 2021. (If you missed it, its 3-foot inner-lit moon is part of the current exhibit.) And many thousands more have seen her in recently-aired commercials for MINI USA and Bose Quietcomfort Earbuds. The latter celebrates the diverse creatives of Los Angeles, and shows her at work bending her neon tubes.
Looking back at her childhood and those late night drives to pick up her mom, Maldonado says “the Strip’s neon signs represented an exciting adult life of autonomy that I couldn’t wait to arrive at.” In “Autonoetic,” which summons those memories, Maldonado has arrived.
Leticia Maldonado (b. 1980) was born in West Covina, California, and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her mastery over shaping (known in neon parlance as bending) is visible throughout her artistic oeuvre. Intricate roses, delicate birds, and hard sgraffito surfaces illustrate a passion for the craft, as well as an innate understanding of transforming emotions into sculpture.
Maldonado is a virtuoso neon bender in her own right. Her artwork challenges the conventions of what sculpture is, as well as pushing neon to go beyond its own limitations, transcending the traditional “street shop sign” toward a purer form a creative expression.
Her works have been included in museum group exhibits, including “She Bends: Women in Neon,” “LIT: Light in Transmission,” and “Construyendo puentes en época de muros,” which travelled to six major cities throughout Mexico. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
THIS IS BERMUDEZ PROJECTS! 10th Year Anniversary 2011-2021
THIS IS BERMUDEZ PROJECTS!
10TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY
2011-2121
May 29–June 26, 2021
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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In late May of 2011, 150 people took two creaky elevators eight stories above downtown LA’s Garment District and crammed themselves into 360 sweaty square feet for the first exhibit at a new gallery: Bermudez Projects, the brainchild of Julian Bermudez.
The crowd had a great time, swigging free wine and talking art and ideas. And while only a handful of people bought art, netting the gallery a princely $240 that night, Bermudez’s idea – people deserve good art – worked!
Today, despite all the challenges of the last decade, including a certain global pandemic that suddenly halted the gallery’s modus operandi, the idea is still working. With a diverse cadre of artists showing their work in a bright modern building in the historic Cypress Park neighborhood of Northeast LA, Bermudez Projects is one of the LA art world’s most unlikely success stories.
To celebrate, gallerist Julian Bermudez has curated “This Is Bermudez Projects!,” an exhibit of 35 works by 15 artists that reflect ten years of accomplishments:
Rare prints in John S. Rabe’s hyper-saturated helicopter print series nod to the first show, and the gallery’s commitment to reflecting the real Los Angeles;
A small installation featuring sought-after and evocative miniature Southeast LA houses by Ana Serrano, paintings by Nanci Amaka and April Bey, Erynn Richardson’s watercolor and gold-leaf “icon paintings,” and Amanda Beckmann’s collage/video speak to Bermudez Projects’ support of women artists;
Works by Yolanda González and Cindy Santos Bravo, from “Ghetto Gloss: The Chicana Avant-Garde,” demark Bermudez Projects’ participation in two (!) of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time events, a remarkable achievement for a fledgling gallery;
Carlos Almaraz’s monumental diptych silkscreen, “Mystery in the Park,” and works from Enrique Castrejon’s “Intimate Embraces” series, underscore the gallery’s support of Latinx and LGBTQ+ artists long before it was de rigueur;
And, a collaborative sculpture by Kellan Shanahan and Nanci Amaka, along with paintings by Emmanuel Crespo pays tribute the gallery’s SPACELAND Biennial, an often unsettling exploration of LA’s future … with some startling predictive parallels to the pandemic year.
Bermudez Projects hasn’t confined itself to shows at the NELA gallery. Julian Bermudez curated the first exhibit of Chicano art at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington D.C. and the first exhibit of Chicano art at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. He also curated and toured an exhibit of Chicano art through five cities in Mexico. And he curated “Black Art Now,” presenting young Black artists at Southern California Public Radio’s Crawford Family Forum … in 2012!
Bermudez, who has lived for twenty years in the same neighborhood as his gallery, says, “Our commitment to providing equity for traditionally underrepresented artists has been the gallery’s ethos since its inception, and we are expanding our scope to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in the arts with our dedicated projects space and thematic group exhibitions.” But through it all, Bermudez Projects’ commitment to the public remains: the art needs to be good art that’s vibrant, personal, stimulating, relatable, inclusive, and affordable.
As Bermudez says, when asked why he’s stuck with this for ten years, “I know art can change the world.”
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John S. Rabe, This Is Bermudez Projects! 10th Year Anniversary, 2021. Archival pigment print and gold foil on watercolor paper. Courtesy of the artist and Bermudez Projects, Los Angeles.
Ana Serrano – who has just released nine new sure-to-be-snapped-up works into the world at Bermudez Projects – likes to walk through neighborhoods, taking note of what makes each of them special – whether it be air conditioners, front yards full of family life, or lush gardens springing out of cement pavement. She collects impressions and with cardboard, glue and colorful acrylics, recreates the universe that contains her world: the homes, the cars, the neighborhoods, the gardens, the people.
“I wanted to be able to capture a little bit of the spirit of an unplanned city,” she says. Her pieces – from full-scale installations, to shockingly accurate models – sit on a point of impingement between what we see and what we pass through without seeing. Evoking a surreal realism, her creations are about houses as homes and the essence of being or having a place in the world. Read more...
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Ana Serrano inside her large-scale installation, Homegrown, 2018. Cardboard, paper, wood, and acrylic paint. 4 ½ x 12 x 12 feet. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Norma and Kevan Newton, Julian Bermudez and John Rabe, Collection of Alfred Fraijo Jr. and Arturo Becerra-Fraijo, Stacy and Samuel Freeman, Alison Shore and Steve Lopez, Barbara and Zach Horowitz, Brandon and Karishma Gattis, Jean Omura, and Helen Yagake. Photo by John S. Rabe.
ARTST UNKNWN at Bermudez Projects | NELA/Cypress Park, Los Angeles
ARTST UNKNWN
Del Cielo Caen las Hojas
March 20–April 24, 2021
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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Inaugurating a new series of installation-based exhibitions dedicated solely to BIPOC + LGBTQ artists, Del Cielo Caen las Hojas is a site-specific installation questioning the concepts of destiny versus free-will. Comprised entirely of corn-based materials, this work serves as an homage to the artist’s mother and their shared Mexican heritage.
“My mom often recalls stories of her early childhood back in Mexico. 5am wake-ups to gather water from the town well; milking goats; and taking corn to be processed into masa harina for tortillas, sopes, or tamales, ” says the artist. “That last chore has always remained in the back of my mind, because if you were to meet my mom, you would have no idea she grew up poor in a small pueblo.”
“There’s a Mexican proverb that says, Al que nace para tamal, del cielo le caen las hojas. For those born to be a tamale, the leaves (or cornhusks) will fall from the sky.”
According to this axiom, Destiny will find you. Yet, the artist challenges this very notion.
“Was it my mother’s will that set in motion the changes in her life? From hauling corn to becoming a college-educated, home-owning American citizen, my mom embodies and challenges the duality of this adage.
Simultaneously, the installation serves as a reminder of life’s impermanence. Over time, the work itself will decompose and cease to exist.
“This work will age, change, and transform, as with all things in life,” adds the artist. “I encourage you to engage and revisit this piece, time and again, as a reminder that nothing is permanent.”
ARTST UNKNWN (b. 1984) was born in Tijuana, Baja California, and raised internationally in Mexico City, New York City, Paris, London, and Hong Kong. The artist has studied at the University of California, Los Angeles and their immersive, installation-based works have been displayed -- guerrilla style -- throughout the cities across the globe. This is the artist's debut installation at Bermudez Projects.
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ARTST UNKNWN, Del Cielo Caen las Hojas (detail), 2021. Corn, cornhusks, masa, corn oil, and tortillas (white, yellow, and blue corn). Courtesy of the artist and Bermudez Projects, Los Angeles.
Ana Serrano at Bermudez Projects | NELA/Cypress Park, Los Angeles
ANA SERRANO
a sense of place
March 20–April 24, 2021
1225 Cypress Avenue, Los Angeles
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Bermudez Projects is pleased to present a sense of place, an exhibition of new sculptures by Ana Serrano.
At the age of 9, Ana Serrano and her mother moved from her grandparents’ home in South Los Angeles to Downey.
In this autobiographical exhibition, Serrano engages the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and historical aspects of these communities through her brilliantly hued sculptures.
“Although my new home was only 10 miles away, it felt like a different world,” says Serrano. “I continued to move between these two places until my teenage years, spending weekends and breaks from school with my grandparents.”
She adds, “I credit the constant traveling within the neighborhoods of Southeast Los Angeles as the start of my interest in the built environment. It also gave me the lens with which I construct a sense of place, taking into account the [many] aspects of these communities. For this body of work, I examine the physical attributes that makes this community meaningful.”
This thoughtful exhibition juxtaposes the complex identities between the two ever-evolving communities of Downey and Southeast Los Angeles through architectural landmarks that have left a lasting impression.
Utilizing cardboard, paper, wood, and acrylic, these artworks capture – with fantastic realism – the memory, emotions, and history associated with two iconic Los Angeles neighborhoods: Downey and South Los Angeles.
Ana Serrano (b. 1983) earned her BFA from Art Center College of Design (2008). Her works have been exhibited in both solo and group museum shows, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Vincent Price Art Museum, and the National Museum of Mexican Art. Serrano’s sculptures are held in private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), AltaMed Art Collection, Los Angeles, The Phyllis & Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University; and the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach. She has been featured in various publications, including The Los Angeles, Times, KCET’s Artbound, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, American Style, Vogue (Mexico), In the Company of Women (Artisan Press, 2016), and The New York Times. Serrano currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
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Ana Serrano, 78 GMC Sierra, 2021. Cardboard, basswood, paper, acrylic, and glue. 14 ½ x 37 ½ x 13 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Bermudez Projects, Los Angeles.
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