Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio

Galerías y otras organizaciones que le representan

Steve Turner Contemporary

Descripción del Artista

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (born Los Angeles, 1990) earned a BA from Bard College (2012), an MFA from Yale University (2016) and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016). Aparicio’s work focuses on the Salvadoran diaspora, migration, and the interrelated histories of Central and North America. He uses rubber, an important natural resource from El Salvador (and Mexico), to create paintings that encapsulate natural and man-made images embedded within the surface of urban trees in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Aparicio’s works are beautiful as paintings but they also represent a complicated history that relates to the Spanish conquest as well as to the complex relationships between Central America, Mexico and the United States. His work was part of the group exhibition The Dog, the Tree and the Catfish at Steve Turner, Los Angeles. These works seek to challenge notions of native versus foreign. They are made from the sap of one non-native tree capturing the surface of another non-native species in a community of non-native people—all of which have become forever rooted and integral to the very essence of those multiple sites. Finally apathy and inaction are in some mainstream circles being talked about as a non-neutral position. I've been hearing about the idea that there is no non-political position. We have seen whom inaction serves. In a similar way, there is no non-political material. Someone recently told me that “everything comes from somewhere” as a way to discredit the importance of the politics of how things came to be where they are. However, instead of feeling like that made all material memory inert I felt that that made all material choices incredibly potent and political. As a country we are suffering from historical amnesia, and an exciting avenue is to embrace memory as a vital aspect of material collaboration. Perhaps the clearest way to follow the traces and branches of colonialism and historical oppression is to first claim total material non-neutrality. There is no neutral position within an ecological understanding of the world where environmental justice is inextricably linked to social justice and all materials in art making (especially our bodies) are part of that conversation. There is a challenge in creating 2D works that are not the image of thing/thought. These rubber castings are neither the original tree itself nor a simulacrum of it; but rather, a liminal space between that was created at the moment of peeling. A creation of a dual self connected to gestures and materials outside of one’s own individual output. A second self that can move throughout the world freely and rest while also staying rooted and upright. The creation of which removed all of the paint and staples and LA car exhaust from the pores of the first indefinitely changing it. In the age of Trump it almost seems necessary to leave subtlety behind, but one benefit of embracing environmental justice strategies bound to social justice ones is that they can be tools for bridging gaps in empathy due to bias. This work explores the visual and conceptual po­­ssibilities of globally ubiquitous raw materials and products of indigenous knowledge of Latin America. In recent years, I have produced monumental rubber casts that document the social and economic relationships between Latin America and the United States through specific use of material, multiplicity of site and metaphorical gesture. The immense casts of trees from the streets of Los Angeles materialize the long-standing presence of Central American communities in the US by serving as a document of specific sites—while also reinforcing the necessity of these communities and their humane treatment. These works explore the false dichotomies between indigenous and foreign; nature and human. Their scale, composition and color create documents of growth and strength within the limited confines of poor city planning. By focusing on nature as a witness to a world entirely touched by humans these works extend out a profound ecological empathy.

Exposiciones en las que ha participado como artista

A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience

Colectiva

Espinas Amorosas/Loving Thorns

Individual

País mío no existes / My country you do not exist

Individual

3 exposiciones