This previous winter, Jackie Amézquita had a number of take a look at bricks organized neatly on a desk in her studio in Los Angeles. In a departure from earlier work, every of those bricks, made with soil and masa de maíz (corn dough), had been inset with a combination containing different natural supplies—blue pea flower, cocoa, cochineal, charcoal, bee pollen, espresso beans, achiote—that gave them sensible hues of blue and mauve or deep tones of ochre and black. That so many biomaterials are simply accessible in LA speaks to the town’s historical past of migration and the legacies of colonialism, Amézquita stated.
She began utilizing soil in her work after a efficiency through which she walked from Tijuana to LA over eight days. Each time she completed a bottle of water, she’d fill it with soil. By the journey’s finish, she had collected some 18 samples—and commenced desirous about her findings as an archive and a website of reminiscence. She remembers questioning, “If Earth might converse, what would it not say? What tales would Earth share?”
Amézquita recalled the creation delusion within the Popol Vuh, through which, after some trial and error, the gods used corn to make the primary people. To make her bricks, she freezes them to carry their form after which bakes them in an oven for a number of hours, flipping them on occasion in a course of she in comparison with cooking tortillas on a comal. After they’ve dried and earlier than a second bake, she takes them exterior to obtain some mild. “I consider the solar as giving life and different vitality to the work,” she stated.
It took her about two years to good the stability in her soil-and-masa bricks, which have figured in a number of works, together with her 2023 set up El suelo que nos alimenta. The wall-size piece, commissioned by the Hammer Museum for that yr’s Made in L.A. biennial, contains 144 sq. bricks made with soil from every of LA’s neighborhoods and incised with drawings representing totally different communities.
Jackie Amézquita: Oro Negro (element), 2024.
Courtesy Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles
Her brick-related works additionally evoke the historical past of migration, which is a central concern to Amézquita’s observe—particularly because it pertains to her household. She moved to LA from Guatemala in 2003, following her mom, who moved in 1987. Her grandmother migrated from Mexico to Guatemala in the course of the Cristero Struggle within the Nineteen Twenties and misplaced her most essential paperwork alongside the way in which. “She needed to begin once more from the ashes,” stated Amézquita, who added that her grandmother’s resilience obtained her pondering: “How can we rebuild the pillars of histories which have been erased, making an attempt to know and piece the whole lot collectively?”
Such questions impressed her to introduce charcoal and ash into her work, simply earlier than the wildfires in January ravaged elements of LA and severely impacted a lot of her associates. She sees them now as a metaphor for regeneration. “We’re nonetheless standing,” she stated. “We’re nonetheless holding on. We are able to create one thing out of what was erased or destroyed.”
