Tag: exhibition

Rachel Zaretsky: The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (replica of a replica)

Rachel Zaretsky: The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (replica of a replica)

Exhibition Dates: July 18th to August 3rd, Friday to Sunday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment (Please email: info@humanresourcesla.com)

Opening Reception: Friday, July 18, 2025 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (replica of a replica) is an exhibition that explores how public memory is shaped through objects, rituals, and acts of commemoration. Featuring new sculpture, video, and photography by Rachel Zaretsky, the exhibition considers how gestures of grief shift when filtered through repetition, spectacle, and consumer culture. It traces ephemeral expressions such as balloons at vigils, pennies tossed into fountains, or offerings left at war memorials as they become standardized within the American commemorative imaginary. Removed from their original contexts, these objects reappear as secular sacred symbols: proxies for headstones, plazas, and places of mourning.

At the center of the exhibition is The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (replica of a replica), a dysfunctional mall fountain anchored by a fragmented plastic figure modeled after the gilded statue at the Americana at Brand mall, which itself replicates the original bronze monument at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France. Surrounded by oxidized pennies and mirrored coins, the sculpture compresses the iconography of monumentality and consumer display into a fractured, ornamental shell—interrogating how public memory becomes stylized, copied, and ultimately hollowed out through cycles of replication and visual consumption. Between a Memory and Record, a video essay, traces the bureaucratic afterlife of offerings collected at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. A photographic installation focuses on spontaneous memorials at sites of gun violence, isolating the recurring image of balloons, symbols that oscillate between mourning and celebration as circulated through news media.

The exhibition investigates how the performativity of mourning, when mediated through standardized forms and repeated display, can displace affective experience and transform acts of remembrance into indexable forms of public feeling. 

Exhibition essay by Harris Bauer is available to read here.

Rachel Zaretsky (b. 1993, Miami) is an artist based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in Art from the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design and her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Harmonic Oscillation — M. A. Guevara

Posted on by hrla


Harmonic Oscillation

M. A. Guevara

Human Resources-LA

410 Cottage Home Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Organized by Hugo Cervantes 

November 6 – 28, 2021

Perfect harmony is not static. Harmony is a forging of many to achieve at best a type of unison. Its amalgamation is often brutal, antagonistic, and at it’s best transformative, blurring the lines between where some thing one ends and the other begins. For the artist M. A. Guevara, harmony, like alchemy, involves precision and repetition: each harmonic blast makes way for the next one, refining the harmony’s rhythmic, visual, and sensual sequence. 

This  process is present in Guevara’s self-portraits, writings, videos, and paintings, where layered images and textures crystalize into opaque images that reference personal histories, hedonistic fantasies, doubling as a form of critique. Guevara’s portraits often bloat and swell faces, incorporating mesoamerican motifs and overstressed facial features that allude to the dysmorphic culture of racial capitalism and its legacies of pain.  His interest in the limits of continuity and legibility emanate throughout his oeuvre, which is reflected in his deployment of continuous patterns of hedonism and gratification, stoicism and sentimentality, and death and creation.

For his debut solo exhibition, Harmonic Oscillation, M. A. Guevara has formed  a new set of works which further his studies in texture and self-portraiture, and veer between personal history and staunch critique. Together the works constellate processes of searching, dismantling, and fortification, in an attempt to  move beyond fixed cycles of life and death. In lieu, M.A. Guevera anchors himself in processes of becoming in his work, preferring the bend and curve of their cycles to linear progression.


M. A. Guevara (b. 1997, Inland Empire, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work comprises the fields of portraiture: painting, writing, and film. He is the author of the short stories Peacock, Gusano, and Featherless, His writings are held in the collection at (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Guevara has shown work with Dirty Looks, Coaxial, Tom of Finland Foundation, and Gamma Galeria Guadalajara. He is a recipient of Human Resources-LA’s 2020 time, money, space residency.

The Artist and Curator would like to thank Corazon Del Sol, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Anna Betbeze, Claudia, Peter Tomka, Hailey Loman, Kate Rouhandeh, Human Resources-LA, all of our friends and family, and San Simon, La Santísima Muerte.

Photography by Zenaido Zamora

Posted on by hrla

Harmonic Oscillation

M.A. Guevara

November 6th – 28th

Curated by Hugo Cervantes

Opening reception, November 6th 5pm-8pm
(Masks are required to enter HRLA)

HRLA is open by appointment and Friday-Sunday from 12-5pm.

Harmony is not static perfection. Harmony is a forging of many to achieve unison. It’s amalgamation is often brutal, antagonistic, and at it’s best transformative blurring the lines between where one ends and the other begins. For the artist M. A. Guevara, harmony like alchemy is a task of precision and repetition, where one harmonic blast makes way for the next one, identifying and refining the harmony’s rhythmic, visual, or sensual sequence. 

It is a process present in Guevara’s self-portraits, writings, videos, and paintings, where layering images and textures together crystalize into opaque images referencing personal histories to seismic hedonistic fantasies and critical critique. Guevara’s portraiture often bloat and swell the face incorporating mesoamerican motifs to overstressed facial features speaking to the dysmorphic culture of racial capitalism and its enduring legacy of pain. His interest in the limits of continuity and legibility emanate throughout his oeuvre drawn to the continuous patterns of hedonism and gratification, stoicism and sentimentality, and death and creation. 

For his debut solo exhibition Harmonic Oscillation at Human Resources-Los Angeles M. A. Guevara has forged a new set of works further illustrating his studies in texture and self-portraiture veering between personal history and staunch critique. Together the works constellate a consistent searching, dismantling, and fortification of oneself with a mission of moving beyond fixed cycles of life and death. In lieu M.A. Guevera orbits towards the bend and curve of cycles preferring their constant becoming as a point of departure in his work.

M. A. Guevara (b. 1997, Inland Empire, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work comprises the fields of portraiture: painting, writing, and film. He is the author of the short stories Peacock, Gusano, and Fatherless. His writings are held at institutions like LACA (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive.) Guevara has shown work with Dirty Looks, Coaxial, Tom of Finland Foundation, and Gamma Galeria Guadalajara. He is a recipient of Human Resources-LA’s 2020 time, money, space residency.