IN

Timo and Rafa are friends.

In the span of their time as friends they have had concurrent and ongoing conversations about race, art, identity, Los Angeles, power structures, community, material, the art world, culture, work, love, struggle, sex, life…

IN is their first collaboration.

IN is a post-industrial snake.



RAFA TO TIMO:

What is IN?
For me IN has been a site of materiality, a site where we have been in meditating, thinking and talking through doing together. It is a place as much as it is a breaking up of space where our ideas meet, agree, contradict, and at times oppose each other. It’s also a place where presence has a proximity of being immersed as opposed to at a safe distance of.

What are the materials that compose IN?
The material that is seemingly most prominent is rebar. It is a reference to and the starting point of our collaboration. I think it’s a material that appropriately grounds the intersections of how we both approach working with “building materials” and the many signifiers they bring — aspects of labor, development, gender, capitalism and urban space — but then there are our individual works — your mixed media electrical post casts, your plaster panel…

My individual contributions are made of adobe and used objects. I wanted to bring in the body and imagine its presence in this twisted landscape of industrial metal.


TIMO TO RAFA: 

What is IN?
The title of our show is based on a long-time exploration of the internal/external values of an object and a being. We are physically represented on the outside—I am interested in what we express or sometimes feel on the inside. The objects I have used in this show present an exterior while providing glimpses of (and eventually full depictions of) what is, or can be, composed within. It is a place where I want to but don't always feel safe—in a family, in community, in collaboration with…

What are the materials that compose IN?
This show is comprised of building materials, manipulated by the maker and presented in a way that references both the material's function as well as the user’s visual scope. I am interested in the synthetic idea of plaster, and its use as a modern placeholder for that of your adobe medium. The two mediums converse in a way that speaks to both tradition and modernization. The rebar that we have used collaboratively, for me, acts as a literal and metaphorical skeleton, further uniting the historical with the modern.


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