Rafa Esparza & Timo Fahler

Timo and Rafa are friends.

In the span of their time as friends they have had concurrent and ongoing conversations about race, art, identity, Los Angeles, power structures, community, material, the art world, culture, work, love, struggle, sex, life…

IN is their first collaboration.

IN is a post-industrial snake.

RAFA TO TIMO:

What is IN?

For me IN has been a site of materiality, a site where we have been in meditating, thinking and talking through doing together. It is a place as much as it is a breaking up of space where our ideas meet, agree, contradict, and at times oppose each other. It’s also a place where presence has a proximity of being immersed as opposed to at a safe distance of.

What are the materials that compose IN?

The material that is seemingly most prominent is rebar. It is a reference to and the starting point of our collaboration. I think it’s a material that appropriately grounds the intersections of how we both approach working with “building materials” and the many signifiers they bring — aspects of labor, development, gender, capitalism and urban space — but then there are our individual works — your mixed media electrical post casts, your plaster panel…

My individual contributions are made of adobe and used objects. I wanted to bring in the body and imagine its presence in this twisted landscape of industrial metal.

TIMO TO RAFA:

What is IN?

The title of our show is based on a long-time exploration of the internal/external values of an object and a being. We are physically represented on the outside—I am interested in what we express or sometimes feel on the inside. The objects I have used in this show present an exterior while providing glimpses of (and eventually full depictions of) what is, or can be, composed within. It is a place where I want to but don't always feel safe—in a family, in community, in collaboration with…

What are the materials that compose IN?

This show is comprised of building materials, manipulated by the maker and presented in a way that references both the material's function as well as the user’s visual scope. I am interested in the synthetic idea of plaster, and its use as a modern placeholder for that of your adobe medium. The two mediums converse in a way that speaks to both tradition and modernization. The rebar that we have used collaboratively, for me, acts as a literal and metaphorical skeleton, further uniting the historical with the modern.

Rafa Esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles, CA) studied at East Los Angeles College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his BFA. Esparza currently works in a variety of mediums, including installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and performance; and has shown work at a variety of sites, including traditional fine art contexts and community-based platforms, as well as outdoor public locations that he has independently sought out and organized. Esparza is persistent in staging situations where he attempts to experience a time and space inaccessible to him. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry; site specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation are his primary tools in interrogating, critiquing and examining ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize.

His work has been shown at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, CA with Clockshop; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; and the Hammer, Los Angeles, CA as a part of Made in L.A. He has performed outside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, Los Angeles, in Elysian Park, Los Angeles; and underneath the viaduct on Fourth and Lorena Streets, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. As well, his work was included in the MexiCali Biennial at the Vincent Price Art Museum and in Native Strategies 3 at Human Resources, Los Angeles. He participated in the symposium “LA/LA Practice and Place” at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; and has been awarded a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, and an Art Matters Grant.

Timo Fahler (b. 1978, Tulsa, OK) is a sculptor living and working in Los Angeles California. Transferring ideas from an overwrought sense of concept into strictly practice and experimentation, Fahler combines mold-made forms with collected materials, and translates them into sculpture based on his current ideas and understanding of formalist principles. Seeing how he can push materials, learn from them, and push them even further, his work is made using hydrocal, ceramics, steel, wood, and found objects, with an emphasis on texture, cyclical and repetitive patterns, as well as the everyday things that usually remain unseen. Fahler, often casting his sculptures in reverse, combines a controlled placement of material with the element of chance to yield nuanced, amorphous pieces that feel almost alive, inciting both an emotional and physical response from the viewer.

Fahler received an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2012, and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009. Fahler’s work has been exhibited at LA><Art, Los Angeles CA; Some Time Salon, San Francisco, CA; Ms. Barbers, Los Angeles, CA; Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, CA with Clockshop; Egyptian Art and Antiques, Beverly Hills, CA; and BBQLA, Los Angeles, CA. Fahler is a recipient of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; Resnick Scholarship, U.C.L.A.; and UCMEXUS Grant.