Widely known for his work as a member of the collective, Date Farmers, Armando Lerma presents his first series as a solo artist at ACE Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, November 4, 2017. Lerma’s work made under the Date Farmers name entails a diffusion of individual authorship, a circumstantial but pertinent anonymity that evoked the nameless throng of farm workers who harvest and serve the food we eat.

Beneath its overt visuality, a cultural identity that remains hidden behind the lines of poverty and struggle, occupies his work. As a solo artist, Lerma develops many of the same themes, but with an underlying consciousness of a cosmic essence, a redemptive power that resides in the timelessness of spirit. While the world at large offers fleeting internet obsessions and political turmoil, Armando Lerma’s work offers a window to another dimension.

Reflections on routine social realities of place conceal an infinite reality. Underlying these works is a subtle and profound connection to nature, the stars, to a universe that transcends space and time. In the labyrinth of Neo-colonialist impositions of otherness, the artist finds himself in conflict by the mere fact of his situation. But he retains insight to an ancestral connection with the infinite amid the displacements of geography and social condition. In a world full of scandal and elitism, the consequence of poverty with its inherent absence of voice, bears a delicate, insightful, and enduring resilience that harks back to its indigenous ancestry for answers. Lerma’s glimpse into our own American experience does not shy away from recognizing the corruption of our inception and its terrible impact on the present.