22 Mar Armory Center for the Arts presents Mi Casa Es Su Casa by Sandra de la Loza
On View Through: Currently on view – Sunday, May 12
The Armory Center for the Arts is pleased to present Sandra de la Loza: Mi Casa Es Su Casa from January 27 through May 14, 2019 in the Armory’s Mezzanine Gallery. In Mi Casa Es Su Casa, the artist alters and intervenes on photographs of her own family to address issues of power, memory, and history through the concept of home. The exhibition is organized by Irene Tsatsos, Director of Exhibition Programs/Chief Curator.
Growing up in sunny Southern California, de la Loza remembers that life was not always easy. Yet, in photo albums taken amidst white flight, her Mexican American family mimics a post-war ideal of what a happy, suburban American family should look like. According to the artist, Mi Casa Es Su Casa aims to suggest the looming social and personal inequities that lay beneath “those perfect lawns and the stiff taffeta.”
By obscuring and replacing the bodies and faces in the photographs, de la Loza calls attention to how the familiar elements of the family snapshot—the landscape, architecture, pose, and fashion—conceal embedded dynamics of race, class, and gender. According to Tsatsos, “Sandra calls out the private dramas that family photographs inadvertently reveal—the strains, the desires, and the discrepancies between the outward appearances of familiar togetherness and the complex, perhaps conflicted nature of the relationships among the subjects, along with the social context within which they perform.”
Presented at the Armory as four immersive installations, Mi Casa Es Su Casa highlights a tension that continues into our contemporary moment, where increasingly difficult living conditions coincide with the pressure, especially via social media, to present a cheerful and fulfilled public image.
About Sandra de la Loza
Sandra de la Loza is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied Latin American history and culture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), earned a B.A. in Chicano Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed her M.F.A. at California State University, Long Beach. In 2013, de la Loza was awarded the California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Grant and the Artist in Residence Grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and in 2012 an Art Matters Grant. She was the Project Research Fellow (2009-2011) at the Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 organized by the Getty Foundation.
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