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You are here: Home / LACE / 2015-2019 / Rafa Esparza: i have never been here before

Rafa Esparza: i have never been here before

 

Rafa Esparza: i have never been here before

Opening reception: Wednesday July 8, 2015, 7-10PM
Exhibition dates: June 9-September 13, 2015

RELATED PROGRAMS
August 26 – Performance by Dorian Wood
September 11-13 -Resonant Forms, a weekend-long series of performances featuring Simon Scott, Bethan Parkes, Lawrence English, Allesandro Cortini, Raquel Gutiérrez with Adam Garcia, Nikki Darling, Sebastian Hernandez, Patricio Morales, and Rafa Esparza, among others. In collaboration with VOLUME–schedule to be posted shortly.

For his summer residency at LACE, Los Angeles based artist Rafa Esparza transforms the architecture of the gallery into a space absent of corners, unified by curve, and made out of brown matter in which an idea, a movement, a conversation can take form.

With the help of his father and extended family members, Esparza will produce 5,000 adobe bricks that will be transported to LACE and used to build an elliptical adobe structure over several weeks. Adobe brick building has both a personal and a cultural significance to Esparza. In addition to serving as a symbol for the Esparza family work, adobe highlights a history of labor, land, and poverty.

The vernacular design and available resources for adobe building evoke owner- and community-built architectural practices that use inherited knowledge and customary technologies. Prioritizing utility over aesthetics, adobe construction often reflects local environmental and cultural needs. Within the project—and entering the gallery—adobe serves to question the established value systems of the exhibition space.

Entitled i have never been here before, Esparza’s summer residency looks to the imagined space and renders the building process visible to the public. Adobe construction, and the communal effort that is inherent in the practice, intersects various histories and economies within the gallery. Through this meeting, the project questions the shape of power, the material and methods of representation, and the accessibility of place for certain bodies over others.

Esparza and his family will begin construction on July 9 and will work during LACE gallery hours, Wed-Sun noon-6PM. Due to the flexible nature of the residency, the artist’s presence cannot be guaranteed during all gallery hours.  After its completion, the adobe structure at LACE will serve as a platform for performance works by Rafa Esparza and invited artists.

Read the L.A. Times article about Rafa’s project here.

Curated by LACE Assistant Director Shoghig Halajian.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rafa Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into Esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, Esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize.

Esparza has performed in a variety of spaces including AIDS Project Los Angeles, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, SOMArts, Vincent Price Museum, LACE and various public sites throughout Los Angeles. He is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.

Read more about Rafa Esparza’s work on KCET Artbound.

SUPPORT
This project is made possible by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs and The Andy Warhol Foundation.

The adobe bricks that Esparza produced for this piece were made at the Bowtie Project, a collaboration between Clockshop and California State Parks. For more information about the Bowtie Project, please see www.clockshop.org/thebowtieproject.

Filed Under: 2015-2019, Exhibition, Installation, LACE, Performance Tagged With: 2015, Adam Garcia, adobe, architecture, Dorian Wood, Exhibition, i have never been here before, installation, Jen Boyd, Lawrence English, Nikki Darling, performance, Rafa Esparza, Rafa Esparza: i have never been here before, Raquel Gutierrez, residency, Ricardo Bracho

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LACE is thrilled to introduce 3 of the artists featured in the exhibition...

⋆ Star Montana (@starmontana) is a photo-based artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She was born and raised in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, which is predominantly Mexican American and serves as the backdrop to much of her work.

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⋆ Arlene Mejorado (@ari.mejorado) is an artist from Los Angeles who works through analog and digital image-making processes to contemplate ideas around memory, landscape, and placemaking. Often working intuitively, Mejorado’s practice ranges from traditional documenting to staging scenes that merge elements of installation, performance, and studio photography.

Join us at the opening reception on Saturday, November 1, 2025 from 2–5 PM at CSULA’s Luckman Gallery. Light refreshments will be provided. RSVP at the link in our bio.

Support for this exhibition is provided by the Teiger Foundation.
LACE’s new group exhibition “A Tender Excavati LACE’s new group exhibition “A Tender Excavation” curated by Selene Preciado opens at the Luckman Gallery at CSULA on Saturday, November 1! Join us for the opening reception from 2–5 PM. Light refreshments will be provided. RSVP at the link in our bio.

“A Tender Excavation” approaches research-based artistic practices through propositions of alternative histories, bringing together a group of artists that work with historical and familial photographic archives as a point of departure to construct new narratives and elicit transformation. Artists featured in the exhibition include Zeynep Abes, Susu Attar, Jamil Baldwin, Mely Barragán, Artemisa Clark, Arleene Correa Valencia, Mercedes Dorame, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Leah King, Tarrah Krajnak, Heesoo Kwon, Ann Le, Arlene Mejorado, Star Montana, and Camille Wong. “A Tender Excavation” is on view from November 1, 2025–February 21, 2026.

“A Tender Excavation” is made possible thanks to our friends at The Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State LA. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Teiger Foundation.
This is the final week to apply for the 2026 Light This is the final week to apply for the 2026 Lightning Fund! LACE is awarding 10 artist project grants of $6,000 each, as well as one $10,000 Jacki Apple Award grant to a mid- or advanced-career artist. Applications close this Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 11:59 PM PDT.

Applicants who are LA County residents, are at least 18 years of age, and are not currently enrolled in a college program, will be considered. Learn more about previously selected projects and submit an application through the Submittable portal at the link in our bio.
Thank you for joining us last night at the 𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗘 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗥 Supporter Preview & Artist Celebration! ♡

We truly appreciate your encouragement of our work supporting emerging artists, curators, and cultural workers. With your generosity, we raised crucial funds for LACE’s operations and programming, which platforms artists and communities currently under attack including LGBTQ+, disabled, immigrant, and BIPOC individuals. With the dismantling of federal funding for the arts and humanities, support for LACE is as urgent and impactful as ever.

Final reminder that the 𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗘 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗥 Benefit Art Auction closes today at 12:00PM PDT (3:00PM EDT)! Bid at the link in our bio. Until next year ˖⁺‧₊⟡₊˚⊹

Photos by Gina Clyne (@ginaclyne)
Slide 1: @0ll668, Slide 2: @laurenmetropolis, Slide 3: @coloredcraig, Slide 4: @smokeholler, Slide 5: @laurenmetropolis, Slide 6: @metabolicstudio
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