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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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On Saturday, August 2 from 2–7pm, join LACE for On Saturday, August 2 from 2–7pm, join LACE for this year's Artists’ Film International (AFI'25) at the Philosophical Research Society (@philosophical_research_society).

This touring film program is collectively curated and presented by 16 international arts organizations and convened by Forma (@formaartsmedia). AFI’25 introduces the work of talented moving image artists to worldwide audiences, and will be live over 300 days, with exhibitions, screenings and public programs hosted across 4 continents.

LACE’s selection for AFI’25 is "Leymusoom Garden: New Sun" (2024) by Heesoo Kwon (@leymusoom). Kwon’s oneiric visual language and unique animation style allow her to create memoryscapes of personal and community liberation. The film rewrites mythical matrilineal histories through utopian and whimsical abstractions of time, space, and memory to ultimately bring forth healing and transformation. 

Admission is free! RSVP at the link in our bio.

Image caption:
Still from Heesoo Kwon, Leymusoom Garden: New Sun, 2024. Courtesy the artist
Join LACE for “Obsidian Reflections” happening Join LACE for “Obsidian Reflections” happening Saturday, July 19, 2–5 PM at the Philosophical Research Society (@philosophical_research_society).

Curated by Selene Preciado and Andrea Acuña, this film program presents a selection of video works that integrate ancestral knowledge and indigenous storytelling, imagining futures where the past and present connect through the power of ruins and resilience. Followed by a musical performance with multimedia NeoCumbia artist El Keamo (@el_keamo).

Learn more and RSVP at the link in our bio!
We are excited to announce LACE's 11th Emerging Cu We are excited to announce LACE's 11th Emerging Curator! Meet Semaj Peltier (@horsebreath87) and pom*pom (@__pom____pom__), collaborators in a curatorial collective and experimental film archive organizing community-based events since 2022. For the Emerging Curator Program, Semaj Peltier and Pom Pom curate "No Loneliness Like This," a film and food event showcasing experimental films that traverse the many manifestations of state-sanctioned isolation.

Peltier, a projectionist, archivist and filmmaker, brings a praxis shaped by her studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Masters program, specializing in ephemeral histories shaped by coloniality and otherness. pom*pom, developed by Russell Hartling and Crystal Dawana, is an experimental food collective whose sensory-driven dining experiences intersect with film programming to evoke memory, storytelling, and connection. Together, they build worlds where film and food become tools of resistance—rituals that evoke memory, incite dialogue, and nurture solidarity through shared sensation and subversion. 

This year’s panel included Jheanelle Brown (@jheaneeeeeelle), faculty member at CalArts and Curator of Film at REDCAT; Carrie Chen (@carriechen01), artist, curator, and educator; and Heber Rodriguez (@hebereatschips), Coordinator for the City of Lancaster’s Parks, Recreation and Arts Department in the Arts and Museums Division. 

Read the full press release in our bio!
If you missed “ENDURANCE” or want to relive th If you missed “ENDURANCE” or want to relive the experience, head over to the LACE website to watch a selection of the performances with more to come soon!

“ENDURANCE” presented performance art and interdisciplinary work by elder artists. These artists use their practices to share wisdom, knowledge, and experiences that they have gained throughout their lives. This series is a companion program to LACE’s 2024 performance series, “ABUNDANCE”, both featuring often invisibilized bodies.

This program was held at L.A. Dance Project (@ladanceproject) from May 16–17, 2025.

The online presentation of “ENDURANCE” is supported by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles (@culture_la). 

Photos by Angel Origgi (@angeloriggi).

Image captions in order:
Barbara T. Smith, OWB, 2025
Ulysses Jenkins and his band “Who Dat!,” Ethnic Cleansing, 2022/2025
Hirokazu Kosaka, Shoot Yourself, 2025
The Dark Bob, Beirut, 1982/2025
Kamau Daáood, Griot notes: Poem in Invisible Ink
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