"Sacred Territory" is a phrase commonly used in Hollywood, otherwise known as a "hot set," meaning a movie set that has been used for filming and must remain untouched for use in an upcoming shot. Once the art department has meticulously staged all props, the slightest alteration will compromise continuity. At the nexus of the exhibited works is each artist’s deeply personal and complex connection to the space inhabited within Los Angeles, instigating a confrontation with personal identity.
The works range in technique, from pouring, to translucent washes, to concise brush strokes, to drawn out smears. The color palette throughout most of the work is bold and unyielding, sometimes shouting. Joanna Beray Ingco presents chroma key green screens on a two-dimensional plane, plunging viewers into silhouettes of icons and electrified neon movements that reference objects of desire, fascination and status.
Works by Theodore Boyer are solid in their convictions, using heavy impasto and laid geometry on neutral fields further explored by his sculptures. Still others appear wet with shiny, tempting surfaces as seen in the oil pastel portraits of Marcel Alcalá, and as intimate expressions of structures of love, loss, and transmutation by Lily Piper Faye. The repetitive strokes of Kenton Parker chip away at the ethos of love as a collection of marks with a canvas interchangeable for his psyche. As a group, the works become emblematic gems of not only practice, but of place.