Event Details
Artists Marcel Pardo Ariza and Dan Paz will be in conversation about image making, vulnerability, queer kinship, and more, in honor of After Touch, Ariza’s debut solo exhibition at OCHI Los Angeles. This conversation will take place online--please register HERE.
After Touch offers a suite of new photographs and installation conceptualized while sheltering in place in Oakland, CA in 2020 and actualized in the midst of transition. Featuring lovingly composed images of Ariza’s transnational and local family, lovers, and dear ones in physical contact after prolonged isolations, these acts of reunion, pleasure, and healing are a testimony to the power of queer kinship.
Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. 1991, Bogotá, Colombia) is a trans visual artist and curator that explores the relationship of representation, kinship, and queerness through constructed photographs, color sets, and installations. Their practices celebrate the erroneous, navigate intergenerational connection, and question arbitrary paradigms while pushing against the boundaries of photography. Ariza is the recipient of awards including a 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award; 2017 Tosa Studio Award; 2018-19 Alternative Exposure Grant; and a 2015 Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award. Their work has recently been exhibited at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Richmond Art Museum; San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Palm Springs Art Museum; and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Ariza is a former member of the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure, a co-founder of Art Handlxrs, and a studio member at Minnesota Street Project. Their current solo exhibition After Touch is currently on view at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, CA through October 23, 2021.
Dan Paz’s work brings a critical and aesthetic lens to the architecture of space, developing projects that build a genealogy of how power articulates itself through image production and access to information. Their research engages the conditions of youth incarceration, image practices and architecture demonstrating how foundational techniques of image-making are inextricable from the environmental politics of racialized subject-making. Most recently, Paz hosted a series of Live-Mapping Workshops with Arizona State University, Vanderbilt University, University of Washington, and University of Colorado at Boulder. In early 2021, Paz guest-edited a forthcoming printed volume of photographs from A New Nothing & Sleeper Studio. Paz has solo exhibitions with ENTRE gallery in Vienna, Austria, www.twosixteen.net, and Michigan State University in 2022/23. With national and international exhibitions, Paz’s projects and collaborations have been featured in Hayward Gallery London, UK; the 12th Havana Biennial at Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, CU; The Media lab, NYC; The Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago, IL; The Lee Center for the Arts and The Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle, WA; Holding Contemporary in Portland, OR. Currently, Paz is 2021/22 Artist-in-Residence in Critical Race Studies with Michigan State University.
Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar-curator at the ONE Archives and teaches in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California.
OCHI is a contemporary art gallery that represents a diverse roster of interdisciplinary artists, programming seamlessly between locations in Sun Valley, Idaho, Los Angeles, California, and abroad. OCHI supports and contextualizes artists with experimental and emerging practices as they investigate the conceptual and material boundaries of art. OCHI is comprised of three spaces: the original gallery has been in Idaho since the 1970s, Ochi Projects was founded in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2015, and OCHI Aux opened in the same building in October 2021. A remarkable moment in OCHI’s unique history, OCHI Aux offers select galleries an opportunity to set up shop temporarily in Los Angeles with collaborative support, alongside OCHI programming.