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
