Frieze Los Angeles 2020
Charlie James Gallery is delighted to debut Gabriella Sanchez’s multidimensional project titled Our Own Making at Frieze Los Angeles 2020. The gallery will feature a solo presentation of painting and sculpture in Booth E11 in addition to a towering mixed media piece executed on the Paramount Studios Backlot as part of Frieze Projects, curated by Rita Gonzalez and Pilar Tompkins Rivas.
Sanchez’s mixed media paintings use an amalgam of visual and textual signifiers to deconstruct the component parts of identity and representation. Through the repetition of text and closely cropped photographic images of body language and of historical events like the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, the works invite a reconsideration of social hierarchies and histories of racial conflict. Mirrored words and physical gestures appear bold and confrontational but equally coded and inconclusive – definition remains just out of grasp. A frequently used oppositional pairing is Sanchez’s contraposition of the hegemonic Helvetica typeface with the more visually loaded, Latinx-associated Gothic or Old English typeface. In their ambiguity, Sanchez leaves space for the viewer to find his or her own meaning in these binary associations through a kind of psychographic mirroring of the self.
Throughout the paintings, various forms of uniform such as those worn by wrestlers, boxers, servicemen and ballerinas sit in conversation with stereotypical Latinx styles of dress, such as those donned by Mousie and Sad Girl, characters from the 1993 movie Mi Vida Loca. These material markers of selfhood not only point to the extreme gender norms around which identity is routinely performed, but they also reveal the extent to which violence can define the margins of belonging and the rules of community membership. With specific reference to the Latinx styles depicted in the paintings, Sanchez asserts that clothing choices are not just a matter of individual style, but represent a form of armor – a way of claiming space when you are not freely granted such, while also contending with the fact that visibility often means increased vulnerability. It is this notion of costume as armor that informed Sanchez’s decision to frame each of the paintings in high-polish aluminum, a material that reappears in her towering Frieze Projects piece on the Paramount Backlot and in her floor sculptures that appear in the booth.
Frieze Los Angeles returns to Paramount Pictures Studios from February 14-16, 2020 to present the best of Los Angeles and international contemporary art by emerging and established artists, alongside a curated program of talks, films and artists’ projects in the backlot movieset at Paramount.
LOCATION
Paramount Studios
5515 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
DATES
Friday, February 14 – Sunday, February 16, 2020
Opening Preview Thursday, February 13, 6-9pm (By Invitation)
Fair Visitors Information
https://frieze.com/fairs/frieze-los-angeles
Selected Works
Installation
