Victor Estrada

Martel Window Project: Roni Shneior

The tree, the bird, the frog, the rabbit, the mountain, the butterfly, the phantom, the space, the drip, and thick, running paint, are subjects that are consistent with my history of art making. The animals in this series were generated by my trip to El Paso, Texas two summers ago.

I was wandering around in my father-in-law’s backyard and saw this collection of plastic animals arranged haphazardly on a table, around a tree, and on a burnt orange brick planter wall. They were all cartoony figures of animals. You know, squirrels looking at you lovingly, stuff like that. They were damaged. The deer had a broken leg and a rabbit was missing an eye. Most of them were chipped and they all were dirty. I was struck by the characters they seemed to embody. It was like walking into a landscape, albeit a very unkempt backyard with a cast of “misfit toys”. I remember when I was a kid starting kindergarten: I was sitting down next to a stool on which perched a record player spinning the tale of the “Ugly Duckling”. It scared the shit out of me as I stared up at what appeared to be this incredibly high stool that emitted a quacking sound. I started crying. However, these backyard characters did not scare me. I was taken by their peaceful, if somewhat disturbing presence and was delighted. The backyard became a sort of a fairyland, holding promise for my imagination. Abutted up against the backyard wall was my father-in-law’s old pickup truck bed with a weathered camper shell. A homeless person was living in it, whom we never saw, only his junk in the bed. He embodied, in a way, a danger hovering over these ‘animals in paradise’.

In a general sense, that is how my present work got started, though not all of it. This weird magical place must have been in the back of my mind, kind of beautifully becoming Big Rock Candy Mountain, generated out of a “rasquache”* aesthetic which originates in working class Mexican culture. What I think I did was take the vast expanse of the Southwest, some of it defiled, some still pristine, and condensed it into this backyard. I am still working on this idea, actually. In the best-case scenario, I envision an installation of my father-in-law’s backyard, built to scale with additional elements. In any event, this show is an attempt to conceptualize my experience and the place of landscape in my imagination.

– Victor Estrada

*rasquache: saying of a person or of a thing; of bad quality or of little value

Victor Estrada was recently included in Casa Tomada, the 2018 edition of Site Santa Fe, New Mexico. He will be the subject of a survey exhibition at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles, which will be concurrent to this exhibition. Estrada was included in the now legendary exhibition Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990s at MoCA, Los Angeles, curated by Paul Schimmel in 1992. He has previously held solo exhibitions at Friedrich Petzel, New York, Shoshana Wayne, Los Angeles, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now the ICA). Estrada lives and works in Los Angeles.