Project Details

Grounded in a mutual interest in native ecologies and land battles around current development efforts in the hills of Northeast Los Angeles, De la Loza and Gudiel engaged in a skills exchange that explored the intersection of these issues through experimental and hybrid forms. De la Loza shared her knowledge of installation art, video, digital technology and public interventions while Gudiel shared their knowledge of shadow art/puppetry and California native plants and ecosystems.  

Meeting every other week, the artists co-created and participated in visualization exercises, technical workshops, research-based walks, creative play dates and conversations with local activists and cultural knowledge bearers. In addition, de la Loza supported Gudiel in a professional development component that helped them develop their bio/CV, project statement and a portfolio to seek funding and exhibition opportunities for their work. 

To document their exchange, De la Loza and Gudiel created a zine. 

Bios

Sandra de la Loza’s research-based practice investigates the underlayers of our present landscape as a means to open portals and envision future worlds through the exercise of collective memory and political imagination. She is the founder of The Pochx Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, an on-going collaborative project that engages the subject of “History” through critical inquiry and artistic processes. For the last two decades her work has approached History as site and subject and has grown into archival, social and site-specific investigations and immersive installations. Her interest in the silences, exclusions and erasures of the past is in what it reveals of the present, and how these “ghosts” can make visible erased histories, unlock the imagination, and create counter memories for the future. She is an Assistant Professor in Chicanx Studies at the California State University at Northridge.  Current and upcoming exhibitions include: Undoing Time: Histories of Art and Incarceration at the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive (2022) and Chicana Photographers at the Tucson Museum of Art (2023).

Jess Gudiel is an LA artist rooted in their practice in horticulture, shadow art and puppetry. Gudiel has worked in local schools and art centers for over ten years sharing knowledge of sustainable organic growing while also using shadow art to bring light to youth’s creative expression of their interaction with local ecosystems.