Arlene Mejorado: Here is the land in me / Aquí está la tierra en mí

“Like a palimpsest I am writing over underwritings that exist—past stories that are imprinted but not conclusive.” –Arlene Mejorado

Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce Arlene Mejorado’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. The show is a culmination of years of cultural, geographical, and familial investigations by Mejorado of the place she has called home since her birth and the various archives left behind by her relatives. The exhibition is primarily comprised of 11 framed photographs, a window hanging of printed film strips and a grassy sculptural installation. The story told by the exhibition is as much a personal statement as it is an uncovering of a specific relationship to the landscapes and cityscapes of Los Angeles.

The show opens with a diptych setting the stage for the works to come. The fabric backdrop exists as static and moving—between showing the city and a shadow of the artist. The backdrop, most often associated with interior movie sets or photo studios is placed by the artist directly on a grassy median on one of Los Angeles’s busy surface street corridors, where drivers go too fast and pedestrians are secondary citizens.

The scenes Mejorado depicts are framed with curtains or pared back portraits of herself and loved ones. There is an uncanny blending of interior and exterior. The slippage between places that are usually separate from one another is a key element of Mejorado’s practice. This blurring of boundaries is manifest when she photographs weathered family photos from her father’s archive on her and her partner’s backs in outdoor settings, with confounding elements like flowers or a blanket that are found both inside and outside.

This spatial play is highlighted in the black and white silver prints on view where the use of reflective glass and previously taken photos on vinyl banners collapses multiple dimensions into one. The figures holding the mirror-like devices up also point to the way the artist is implicated in the construction of the scene, but also that she is embedded within the physicality of a cityscape as well.

Arlene Mejorado is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work engages analog and digital image-making to explore memory, landscape, and placemaking. Her practice, often intuitive, moves between traditional documentation and constructed scenes that incorporate elements of installation, performance, and studio photography. Informed by her upbringing in a migrant and multiethnic household, Mejorado’s work undertakes a process of cultural repair—addressing erasure and piecing together fragments of personal, collective, and diasporic narratives and archives. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego.