anonymous gallery is happy to host The Mistake Room (TMR) for the occasion of CONDO in Mexico City, and co-present the exhibition: No Longer Yours. The exhibition explores the resurgent interest in the figure, and in particular, artists of color, living and working in the United States. Curated by Cesar Garcia, TMR Executive & Artistic Director, Kris Kuramitsu, TMR Deputy Director & Head of Program, and Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, TMR Assistant Curator, the exhibition includes artists: Aaron D. Estrada, Cosmo Whyte, Eddie Aparicio, Fay Ray, Felipe Baeza, Ofelia Marquez, Ronny Quevedo, Susu Attar, Young Joon Kwak.

“At a time when calls for greater inclusion of people of color in cultural spheres in the US have taken on a new sense of urgency,” says Kris Kuramitsu, TMR Deputy Director & Head of Program, “this exhibition begins by reflecting on what the intentions and consequences of this push for equitable representation may be,” she adds. The show, which is a focused version of a broader iteration that will be presented at TMR’s Downtown LA space in Fall 2018, aims to create a parallel between recent approaches to figuration and the current sociopolitical climate shaping cultural institutions and industries in the US.

“In recent years we’ve seen a generation of young artists return to the figure in their work, specially across, painting, sculpture, and photography,” says TMR Assistant Curator Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia. “This bolstered presence of the body in contemporary art, paired with a reinvigorated public debate about expanding the visibility of people of color in museums, film, television, theater, dance, music, and other creative fields, led us to begin to explore what the relationship between these two occurrences may be,” he adds.

“Today, as we see more images of people of color in museums and on screen, a recurring conversation comes up in many of our studio visits that wonders how long this embrace of diversity will last and who in the end really benefits from the pictures and stories that these marked bodies inhabit,” says Cesar Garcia, TMR Executive & Artistic Director. “As these marked bodies circulate in images, they become more easily consumable by the same institutions and industries that have historically been responsible for their invisibility,” he states.

The exhibition brings together works by artists for whom this reverberating call for visibility is highly suspect. In their work, they resist, evade, and even undermine the image of the legible body. Through a visual language of concealment and obstruction, they assemble estranged and cryptic forms that resist immediate identification and in turn, compulsive consumption. In their work, opacity is both strategy and tactic—a way to cultivate intimate knowledges and forms of value that are purposefully meant not to be accessible to all.

This exhibition is also a fundraiser for TMR. “Benefit auctions are a common way to fundraise for non-profits, but they are incredibly demanding for artists. We’ve been thinking about different kinds of partnerships with artists so that they too can benefit from our fundraising efforts,” says Garcia. Rather than stage an auction, this show is a selling exhibition. Half of all proceeds raised will go directly to participating artists and the other half to TMR in support of its programs. “We are deeply conscious of the need to re-imagine how alternative spaces can remain sustainable and autonomous,” adds Garcia. “Creating these types of engagements in which we don’t just ask artists to give, but rather, to work alongside us so that we can help sustain each other, is something we’ll be doing more of moving forward,” he adds.

ABOUT THE MISTAKE ROOM
The Mistake Room (TMR) is a platform for art, ideas, and practices fuelled by radical imagination. Operating from a renovated industrial warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles, TMR works with artists, thinkers, and makers from around the globe to help instigate new ways of being and knowing while transforming how people access, experience, and engage with culture.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

AARON D. ESTRADA
(b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA)
In shrine-like installations, sculptures, and performances Aaron D. Estrada explores the engineering of identity and socioeconomics. He is influenced by iconography and inscribed marks that hold remnants of erasure. To him these areas are filled with multifaceted cultural signifiers: territorial symbols, tags, altars/shrines, murals, and other esoteric residue. Aaron is interested in the idea of an object having a life of its own both through assigned and unassigned cultural practices.

COSMO WHYTE
(b. 1982, St. Andrews, Jamaica)
Cosmo Whyte is a trans-disciplinary artist who employs drawing, performance, and sculpture to create conceptual work that explores how notions of identity are disrupted by migration—particularly migration as an unfinished arc of motion whose final resting point remains an open-ended question. He situates his work in the liminal space between early culture shock and final acclimatization. His creative process begins through the interrogation of his own (racialized as black, gendered as man) body, and the personal memories that are embedded within it. He uses this archive as his entry point into collective political interrogations.

EDDIE APARICIO
(b. 1990, Los Angeles, CA)
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio is a first generation American of Salvadoran descent whose work focuses on the Salvadoran diaspora and related themes. His works explore the false dichotomies between indigenous and foreign; nature and human. The immense casts of trees from the streets of Los Angeles materialize the long-standing presence of Central American communities in the US by serving as a document of specific sites—while also reinforcing the necessity of these communities and their humane treatment. By focusing on nature as a witness to a world entirely touched by humans these works extend out a profound ecological empathy.

FAY RAY
(b. 1978, Riverside, CA)
The California artist Fay Ray explores the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochrome photomontages. Her works are inspired by fashion shoots and surrealist collages. Ray fragments glamorous signifiers into sensuous shapes, taking animal skin, diamanté, fishnet, and reflective surfaces, and pasting them together with images of hands, hair, and feet.

FELIPE BAEZA
(b. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico)
Art practice of Felipe Baeza is informed by reverse anthropology, explores themes from his own personal biography, and is explicitly political. Immigration, AIDS, and queer identity are at the forefront of his work. According to the artist, he belongs to a population absent from U.S. cultural and historical production and often referred to as “illegal.” Through his practice, he aims not only able to reclaim his personal narrative, but to creatively reconstruct history. He does this through the reassembly of imagery: colonial propaganda, indigenous codexes, consumer print media. Additionally, he creates new iconography presenting alternative and relevant understandings of colonialism, culture, and sex.

OFELIA MARQUEZ
(b. 1986 Santa Ana, CA)
Ofelia Marquez is a first generation Mexican-American artist based in Los Angeles. Ofelia’s exceptionally detailed wood- work is often combined with recycled fabrics that our hand sewn together acting as a kind of armature that engages cultural and social relationships/inter- sections associated with death and continuum.

RONNY QUEVEDO
(b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador)
Ronny Quevedo’s artistic practice is an examination of the vernacular languages and aesthetic forms generated by displacement, migration, and resilience. Inspired by his own family history and migration, Quevedo skillfully transcribes graphics of locality, community, and remembered environments directly into his work. This process often results in imagery that serves simultaneously as an homage to the narratives of historically marginalized peoples, and a platform for dialogue and community engagement on continued practices of marginalization.

SUSU ATTAR
(b. 1982, Baghdad, Iraq)
Susu Attar is a multi-media artist. She was born in Baghdad and raised in Los Angeles. Her works draw from travel between both cities, exploring the space between diasporic memory and the documentation of loss.Referencing family photos, Attar’s work involves re-creating childhood memories of people and places that no longer exist.

YOUNG JOON KWAK
(b. 1984, Queens, NY)
Young Joon Kwak is a LA-based multi-disciplinary artist working primarily through sculpture, performance, video, and collaboration. Her work aims to change how we view our bodies by reimagining their form, functionality, and materiality—from static and bound to pre-inscribed power structures, to an expanded sense of bodies and their environs as mutable and open-ended. She is the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon/platform for experimental performance collaborations with her community of queer, trans, femme, POC artists and performers, and the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

@themistakeroom @anonymousgallery @condo_complex | #nolongeryours | #condocdmx2018

PRESS INQUIRIES:
TMR (Los Angeles): Carlos J. Mendez, carlos@tmr.la
anonymous (Mexico City): Karina Abdusalamova, karina@anonymousgallery.com

FOR SALES INQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT
Los Angeles: Kris Kuramitsu, kris@tmr.la
Mexico City: Joseph Ian Henrikson, joseph@anonymousgallery.com

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Eddie Aparicio , Susu Attar , Felipe Baeza , Aaron D. Estrada , Young Joon Kwak , Ofelia Marquez , Fay Ray , Ronny Quevedo , Cosmo Whyte .