LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio from November 12, 2023, through June 16, 2024, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The first solo museum exhibition for Los Angeles–based artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (b. 1990, Los Angeles), the exhibition explores Aparicio’s engagements with the Salvadoran communities in which he was raised, his formal experimentation with natural materials–including rubber, amber, glass, and clay–and his approach to social justice as a form of ecological justice. Admission to MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio is free courtesy of Carolyn Clark Powers.

MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio features artworks dating from 2016 to the present and includes the debut of three new large-scale sculptures specially commissioned for The Geffen Contemporary. Organized by Curator Anna Katz with Curatorial Assistant Anastasia Kahn, the exhibition marks the relaunch of the MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles and centers on new or discrete bodies of work.

“We are delighted to relaunch the museum’s esteemed MOCA Focus series with an ambitious exhibition highlighting key elements of Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s prolific practice, which often explores the interconnections between Central America and Los Angeles,” said Johanna Burton, The Maurice Marciano Director. “Between the 1990s and mid-2000s, the historic MOCA Focus exhibition program was central to MOCA’s mission to champion the art of our time and our identity as the only artist-founded museum in L.A. We are thrilled to reaffirm our dedication to providing artists with vital opportunities to collaborate with curators, exhibition specialists, and educators in the development, presentation, and interpretation of their work. With his ceaselessly imaginative and ambitious approach, Aparicio embodies the essence of Los Angeles, his birthplace, and brings forth a distinctive and original perspective at this auspicious stage in his career.”

For this MOCA Focus presentation, Aparicio debuts three large-scale sculptures commissioned by MOCA and installed throughout a 3,500-square-foot gallery at The Geffen Contemporary. Two are primarily composed of prefossilized amber, a naturally occurring tree resin, and extend Aparicio’s project of reckoning his art with his heritage in the context of Salvadoran Civil War (1979–92) and the subsequent mass migration of Central American refugees to Los Angeles. Sepultura de semillas (Epitafio para la tumba de Adolfo Báez Bone), 2021– 23, resembles large amber boulders embedded with sundry objects Aparicio gathered from Salvadoran neighborhoods in Los Angeles—cigarettes, car parts, dishware, twigs, leaves, and other bits of flotsam and jetsam—as well as archival documents related to the Central American solidarity movement. The site-specific installation 601ft² para el Lago Suchitlan / 601 sq. ft. for Lake Suchitlan (2023) has been created by pouring liquid amber onto the floor, where it will solidify into a shape evoking El Salvador’s Lake Suchitlán reservoir. The work also includes facsimiles of documents from the nonprofit Central American Resource Center (CARECEN).

“Aparicio deploys a wide range of natural materials and found objects to give shape to lived experiences of diaspora and solidarity often left out of the official historical record,” said Katz. “Deeply rooted in the visual and cultural character of Los Angeles, Aparicio’s work creates counter-archives of the communities he grew up in and implores us to consider the most critical issues of our city and our moment–from political speech to the immigration crisis–according to long arcs of nature and history.”

The foundation of Aparicio’s practice is “total material non-neutrality,” which the artist initially realized through his Caucho (Rubber) series (2016–ongoing). MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio showcases a range of Caucho works, in which Aparicio casts the trunks of Los Angeles trees, frequently the ficus, slated for removal in rubber— the internal fluids of the Castilla elastica, a species native to El Salvador. The resulting impressions are textured with residual bark, exhaust particles, and graffiti marks. The casts couple with collages of found clothing and ephemera from the Pico-Union, Highland Park, and Westlake neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and are embellished with painted references to the presence and expression of the Central American diaspora in popular culture and the built environment. In this body of work, Aparicio invokes rubber’s history as a vital pre-Hispanic Indigenous technology and its status as a material of imperialist trade, giving shape to immigrant communities’ connections to land and place. At the core of Aparicio’s practice is a commitment to the cultural and scientific knowledge of often marginalized and even vilified Central American immigrant communities, making MOCA’s location in downtown Los Angeles, the heart of the Salvadoran diaspora, particularly resonant.

MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring approximately thirty full-color plates and an essay by Katz, which situates Aparicio’s work within art history and social discourses of the present day. The catalogue is designed by Polymode Studio and inaugurates the Nimoy Emerging Artists

Publication Series (Nimoy Series), which provides artists with a crucial publishing opportunity at a breakthrough moment in their careers. The Nimoy Series is made possible thanks to generous support from Susan Bay Nimoy and her late husband, Leonard Nimoy, through the Nimoy Fund for Emerging Artists.

MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio is organized by Anna Katz, Curator, with Anastasia Kahn, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.