Grand Central Art Center
Featuring exhibitions by
Lorena Ochoa: Se Busca
Carolina Caycedo: Fuel to Fire
Susy Bielak and Fred Schmalz: Welcome
Santa Ana, CA
October 2023
Video by L.A. Art Documents / www.laartdocuments.com
Text Source: http://www.grandcentralartcenter.com/
Lorena Ochoa: Se Busca
SE BUSCA focuses on the intersection of memory and transport. Memory as in generational trauma, indigeneity, Purépecha ancestry, and how these memories from blood and dirt are transported through migration. It views migration, such as the migration of the artists mother from Michoacan to Santa Ana, the Santa Ana River’s path into the Pacific Ocean and oceanic currents combining with the mouths of rivers in Michoacan, and concrete freeways used for redlining all as synonymous. In the way that Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) questioned whether the paper, the pencil markings, the eraser tracings, or the memory are the artwork, these works rebel against the definition of art object and artwork while critiquing the hierarchical methods of labor and gender norms.
Carolina Caycedo: Fuel to Fire
Fuel to Fire is a single channel video that brings the viewer into a pagamento or payback of gold to a body of water. This ritual was performed for the wellbeing and conservation of the Paramo de Santurbán, a moorland ecosystem within the high mountains of Northwest Colombia, which holds large -sought after- deposits of gold. The pagamento is an indigenous ecological and economic fundamental protocol, that maintains the flow and balance of life cycles on earth. When accumulation happens, sickness arrives, and so it’s necessary to give back by letting go of something that is dear, that implies labor, or that is highly symbolic.
Susy Bielak and Fred Schmalz : Welcome
Welcome centers the limits of welcome, including the social structures that determine who is welcome and under what circumstances it may be rescinded, curtailed, or abandoned. Welcome responds to contemporary and historical acts of social and environmental control in Orange County - including plant hybridization, civic regulation, labor, immigration, the uses of public space, and property division. Through video, painting, sculpture, text, and sound, the works highlight how unwelcome coexists with joy and inclusion in Southern California.
Learn more at: www.grandcentralartcenter.com