Welcome to LACE

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

  • Programs
    • Projects
    • Emerging Curator Program
    • Apprenticeship
    • Lightning Fund
    • Se habla español
  • Archive
    • Archive
    • Publications
  • About
    • Visit
    • History
    • Ethos
    • Board of Directors
    • Team
  • Support
    • Benefit Art Auction
    • Give Now
    • Membership
    • Supporters
    • Special Editions
  • Shop
    • Online Shop
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

Visit

TEMPORARY OFFICE LOCATION
6464 Sunset Blvd.
Ste. 1070
Los Angeles, CA, 90028

tel: 1(323)250-0940
info@welcometolace.org

LACE recognizes our presence on Tovaangar, the unceded ancestral lands of the Gabrielino-Tongva people who are its rightful caretakers.

Lace Logo

Follow

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

GIVE NOW

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube

News

LACE’s Lightning Fund Opens August 15, 2025!

PRESS RELEASE: Announcing LACE’s Next Emerging Curators

Announcing the 2025 Lightning Fund and Jacki Apple Awards

More News

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)

welcometolace

“A Tender Excavation” approaches research-base “A Tender Excavation” approaches research-based artistic practices through propositions of alternative histories, bringing together a group of artists who work with historical and familial photographic archives as a point of departure to construct new narratives and elicit transformation.

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

❥ Jamil G Baldwin (@juh_mile) was born in Lancaster, CA and raised in and across the Inland Empire and Los Angeles. Baldwin’s work explores the ability of the photographic document to reconstitute the histories of images and material into value systems of care.

❥ Camille Wong (@camillexwong) is a research-based artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Their practice examines power, geopolitics, and historiography through the lens of media and spectacle. They approach the gaze of ethnography by authoring the personal into the world through experimental documentary.

❥ Artemisa Clark (@bustilacaca) is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles. She received a MA in performance studies from Northwestern University in 2016 and a MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2015. She has exhibited and presented research in spaces such as MOCA, The Hammer, the Mexican Consulate, the Vincent Price Art Museum, and more.

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.
Swipe to see selections from LACE’s archive over Swipe to see selections from LACE’s archive over the last almost 50 years!

LACE is excited to announce that we will be at the Los Angeles Archives Bazaar this Saturday, October 18, at CSULA! The event will feature 80 local and regional collections, along with practical workshops and exclusive presentations by archivists, filmmakers, and preservationists.

This year’s Archives Bazaar is presented by the LA as Subject Research Alliance in partnership with the USC Libraries, the Cal State LA University Library, and the Cal State LA Pathway Programs Office.

The Archives Bazaar runs from 10–3 PM in the Golden Eagle Ballrooms at Cal State LA. Admission is free. For the full program and exhibitor list, visit laassubject.org.

Slide 1: “The Archival Impulse: 40 Years at LACE” (March 15, 2018 – November 7, 2021). Photos by Chris Wormwald (@christopherwphoto).
Join LACE and multidisciplinary artist Marnie Webe Join LACE and multidisciplinary artist Marnie Weber (@marnieweberstudio) on Thursday, November 13 from 7-9 PM at the Philosophical Research Society (@philosophical_research_society) for the Los Angeles premiere of her latest film, “House of the Whispering Rose” (2025). The screening will also feature Weber’s film “Song of the Sea Witch” (2020).

Filmed at the historic Beverly Estate in Beverly Hills, where silent film star Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst shared their final days, “House of the Whispering Rose’’ takes place against a backdrop of forgotten wealth and grandeur.

Following the screening, LACE’s Curator and Director of Programs Selene Preciado (@selene__preciado) speaks with Marnie Weber to learn more about the making of the films and her collaborations. Light refreshments will be provided.

Reservations are filling up quickly and space is limited. RSVP at the link in our bio.

This program is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The works selected for “A Tender Excavation” d The works selected for “A Tender Excavation” depart from personal, familial, or historical photographic archives which ultimately are recontextualized through installation, collage, painting, film, video, sculpture, or mixed media, reimagining and reconnecting lost fragments to speak about personal and collective resilience, constructing new possibilities for an interconnected futurity.

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

✷ Mercedes Dorame (@mercedes.dorame)  is a multi-disciplinary artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction and ancestral connection to land and sky.

✷ Leah King (@leahkinglive) is a multimedia artist working in collage, sound, film, and performance. Her intricately layered visual and sonic works explore race, gender, and power through a futurist lens.

✷ Ann Le (@annsgood) is a LA based artist and Senior Lecturer of Photography and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University. Her photomontages explore identity, family history, the diaspora, and the space in between becoming Vietnamese-American.

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.
Follow on Instagram

Copyright © 2025 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions