(staff photo by JOHN DANIEL GARCIA)
Ballroom Marfa artist Rafa Esparza wheels adobe bricks after drying.
By JOHN DANIEL GARCIA
johndaniel@bigbendnow.com
MARFA – Ballroom Marfa will unveil its latest exhibition, Tiera. Sangre. Oro., from Los Angeles-based artist Rafa Esparza with a reception from 6-9pm Friday.
The reception will feature sculpture, performance, and a new adobe installation conceptualized by the artist, as well as work from collaborators Beatriz Cortez, Star Montana, Carmen Argot, Nao Bustamante, Timo Fahler, and Eamon Ore-Giron.
Esparza, a first-generation American whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico, has been using adobe to express personal, political, cultural, and environmental issues after learning the process of mud brick making from his father.
“When I first started working with adobe, it was a way to bond with my father and fix our relationship, as he was just accepting the fact I’m queer,” he said of his early days. “My father was a brick maker in Mexico, and he taught me his recipe. It was the first step in our recovery.”
Years later, he said, while visiting a Michael Parker sculpture of an unfinished obelisk on the banks of the L.A. River – inspired by a similar monument in Egypt – Esparza conceived of his first work in adobe for L.A. non-profit arts organization Clockshop.
“I was interested in the way Michael was gesturing toward that site, specifically, with a symbol of power. The L.A. River is currently a concrete, channelized viaduct, it used to be a natural body of water that was used by the indigenous people of that area, and I wanted to present that on the project I proposed,” he said.
As he began work on adobe bricks for his performance, he invited his father to teach his siblings and mother to make the bricks to cover the obelisk for what he called, “a platform” for the performance; which he views as an expression of history, colonization, race, and ownership.
For the artist, his performance art – which is often physically demanding – is related to his adobe making.
“There’s definitely a relationship between my performances and adobe, especially in the endurance and durational aspects,” he explained. “The process of making adobe is endurance-based, durational. They are both mediums in a very different way. Performance is about presenting my body in places that are contested sites, and I feel like adobe functions similarly when I bring it into traditional art spaces or galleries.”
Esparza has also continued his process of working with other artisans to create the adobe bricks, inviting adoberos Ruben Rodriguez of El Paso, Maria Garcia of L.A., and Sandro “El Loco Adobero” Canovas of Marfa.
“I work with a specific community to make the adobe bricks. There’s sort of a prolonged engagement, and often times, they’re with people I’ve never met and would like to get to know. It’s always about thinking about the labor as a way to be together without forcing a conversation or dialogue, where working together itself could generate a conversation, a dialogue, or a relationship. The process of making the bricks has become a vehicle for a new way of being together,” he said.
Esparza also enjoys to hold what he calls “open days,” in which members of whichever community he’s working in are invited to watch or participate in the making of the bricks.
“I invite the people to come out to understand the labor it takes to make adobe bricks and to understand the relationship to the land,” he said.
Esparza added that while making the Ballroom installation, he visited Ojinaga brick maker Don Miguel Rodriguez, who has been making adobe for 40 years and continues to do so even as he nears 80 years old.
“He sells his adobe at six pesos per brick. Brick making is a very undervalued labor. Brown labor has always been undervalued,” the artist said. “The open days, I hope, gives a little insight into how intensive and laborious it is to make adobe.”
The labor into making bricks also gives participants a knowledge of the material’s use.
“It’s been important for me being in a place where adobe is common. In L.A., you can only find it in museums and very few houses. To see it where it’s used in a function, like as building material for homes, it’s uncanny,” he said. “In the town where my folks grew up, every building is made from adobe. It was the most accessible material they had. They don’t have to pay for it, just dig a pit and make the bricks. It’s not a fetishized, aesthetic building material, it’s just what people had.”
Ballroom Marfa’s staff, he also said, has been instrumental in putting the exhibit together, not just through administrative efforts, but also through labor.
“This is the first time I’ve worked with an arts organization like Ballroom Marfa, where the entire staff came out to help make bricks. They blurred the line between the division of labor and it was great,” he said. “[Ballroom Marfa Executive Director] Laura Copelin has, since the inception of the exhibit, been very involved. The exhibit would never have been possible without the support, openness, and the want to engage from her co-workers and peers in the process. It’s been really rad.”
Tierra. Sangre. Oro. opens at 6pm tomorrow night with a performance by music collective JD Sampson and The Men performing at 8:30pm.
