BODY MEMORY - BODY VISION: Performance Works

rafa esparza

rafa esparza

rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces. 
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esparza is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts (2014), and Art Matters Foundation grant (2014). Solo exhibitions have been held at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio, TX (2018); Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA (2017); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA (2015); Bowtie Project, Los Angeles (2015); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2013). esparza has performed at art institutions including Performance Space New York and the Ellipse, Washington, D.C. (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and Clockshop, Bowtie Project, Los Angeles (2014). Selected group shows were held at San Diego Art Institute, CA (2019); DiverseWorks, Houston, TX (2019); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); GAMMA Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019); Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NV (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); LA><ART, CA (2017); PARTICIPANT, INC., New York (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2015); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2013).

esparza's work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York




bust





Notes from Curator Natalia Ventura

I was introduced to rafa esparza’s work in the first studio class I ever took after deciding to pursue art-- performance art. It was an unconventional place to start in terms of learning about art in an academic setting, but performance art forced me to quickly question the social constructions and rules that were pulling me away from liberation. As a Mexican, second-generation Cuban immigrant, border-dwelling, Catholic woman, there were a lot of rules I was conditioned to believe would lead me to success and happiness. Performance art taught me that these rules were set by the capitalistic, colonial patriarchy, and were not benefiting me in any way. It provided me with a space to break the rules, gain agency over my own body, and take control of my consciousness. I see the same happening when I watch rafa in his performances. 

Like all performance artists, rafa transcends into a parallel reality where he writes the rules. Rules that lead him closer to liberation, happiness, and his own definition of masculinity. Rules that cause the viewer to question the rules they have set for themselves and those around them. Rules that exist in an intersection of gender nonconformity, Mexican culture, a rejection of machismo, and Los Angeles. 

This is especially evident in rafa’s performance bust. a meditation on freedom, 2015. In this performance, rafa frees himself from a concrete encasing with a hammer and chisel, backdropped by two storefronts for “Bad Boys Bail Bonds” and “Bond Girls Bail Bonds.” The longer rafa chisels, the more important and exaggerated each crumble becomes. The viewer feels the freedom coming slowly, feeling especially liberated when a large chunk crumbles off. I interpreted the performance as a critique on gender expectations and the gender binary, and the way we can feel boxed in between the two labels, especially within Latinx communities. rafa, being positioned in between the two storefronts and freeing himself from the cement, is also freeing himself from the gender binary. 

MEXIKA HI-FEM, 2018, was performed at a music festival in Toluca, Mexico. In this performance rafa walks into a tent at the festival wearing a dominatrix outfit, acrylic nails, long braids, and a stone over his face. Around him, reggaeton music is blasting, and a festival audience watches him. On the journey to the sage, rafa’s supporters burn sage and guide him, as the stone covers his ability to see. He walks up to the platform surrounded by plaster Catholic statues, dances for a second, sits on the platform, and begins to repeatedly smash the statues against the stone covering his face. The sound of the plaster shattering and falling around him is drowned out by the sound of the reggaeton. With each smash of a statue, rafa resists the Mexican, Catholic social expectations for what it means to be masculine, feminine, and pure. The performance ends, rafa walks away, and the audience cheers. 
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MEXIKA HI-FEM





https://commonwealthandcouncil.com/us/rafa-esparza/biography
 

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