Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio for “MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
November 12, 2023–June 16, 2024
To relaunch its “MOCA Focus” exhibition series, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles chose LA-based artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio to take over a portion of its sprawling Geffen Contemporary location. Marking Aparicio’s first solo museum presentation, the exhibition acted as a mini-survey for this young artist, with work made between 2016 and 2023 represented alongside three site-specific commissions.
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Aparicio tends to use unconventional materials to mine specific histories related to Los Angeles and El Salvador. Juan Edgar Aparicio, Eddie’s father and himself an artist, was born in that nation; he fled it during the country’s civil war. The earliest works in the MOCA show came from Aparicio’s ongoing “Caucho (Rubber),” in which he casts Ficustrees around LA with rubber from Salvadorean Castilla elastica plants. Aparicio presents these casts as sculptures, offering them as portraits of the urban landscape of LA—knots, smog, graffiti, and all.
For this exhibition, Aparicio faced a logistical issue during the planning process: the city wouldn’t grant a permit for his show in its intended space unless he reduced it in size by 601 square feet. Aparicio instead saw this challenge as an opportunity to find a new way of working, which led to the creation of his poured-amber 601ft2 para El Playon / 601 sq. ft. for El Playon. In his amber works, Aparicio incases various found objects typically relating to Salvadorean history; at MOCA, he included volcanic stones, specially fabricated ceramic bones, documents about El Salvador’s civil war, and found items from MacArthur Park, a main hub for the Salvadorean community in LA. The work’s poured form also mimicked that of El Playon, a rural site outside San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, that was marred decades ago by a volcanic eruption and later became a dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared. In Aparicio’s work there is a commitment to experimentation and to pushing materials to their limits, only to show us new ways of seeing and thinking. This is the beginning of an incredibly promising career.
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