Graphic billboards, colored pencil sketches, and slabs of concrete punctuated by an artist’s signature all have a place in Jeffrey Deitch’s latest exhibition, “At the Edge of the Sun.” Organized by a tight-knit network of Los Angeles artists, the intimate show upends stale preconceptions about the city’s artistic movements and materials. Unlike other presentations that have endeavored to package a singular Angeleno aesthetic, these curator-artists are writing their own postcards to their home city—in the first-person plural.
For Jaime Muñoz, one of the dozen creatives featured, the freeway is the city’s most significant monument. “My focus on the vehicle is rooted in identity and labor,” the Pomona-based painter explains. “I’m fascinated by the ways that commodification reaches into realms as deep as religion in capitalist culture.” Toyotas and larger-than-life gears populate his sun-baked compositions, like icons in a working-class cathedral.
The group of artists helming “At the Edge of the Sun” have been in conversation over the past decade, offering their unique visions of the discursive themes that emanate from their hometown’s shared landscape and practices. That history, says rafa esparza, helped make for a fluid curatorial experience: “Being part of a group this large and sharing equal responsibility in organizing the exhibition is a huge feat. It takes unwavering commitment to the collective vision to maintain a non-hierarchical mode of working.”
For his contribution, the performance and installation artist pulled materials straight from the Los Angeles earth to assemble an adobe mural. The piece explores body modification practices and anthropomorphic images “indigenous to America,” he says. Other works on view include Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s extraction of an LA sidewalk corner; Mario Ayala’s installation of a trucker lounge; an airbrushed metal gate from Ozzie Juarez, complete with barbed wire; and oil paint portraits on wood paneling by Shizu Saldamando.
Before the exhibition’s conception, Saldamando had already composed portraits of half of the participating artists, a by-product of their preexisting proximity. “Although my portrait work is celebratory of friends and creative peers, it is also born out of historical, political endurance and survival as the legacy of immigration and political activism,” she notes.
Ultimately, the show seeks to close a cultural gap that often emerges between the content creators and contextualizers of the art world. Saldamando sees her comrades as “all traversing this balancing act of having work exist in institutional spaces but still creating and existing in [our] own neighborhoods and being inspired by familial histories and practices.” What these artists, and their show offer, she concludes, is a working study of “existing at the edges of it all.”
“At the Edge of the Sun” will be on view from February 24 through May 4, 2024 at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles.
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