Isaac Vazquez-Avila - Pata de Perro (Dog’s Paw)

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 7th, 6 -9 pm

Exhibition Dates: April 7th - April 28th, 2018

Flowing strands of hair yielded in tense graphite scrawls perch carefully, ending abruptly in various steps as they pass the figure’s chin, forming an inverse of an Aztec stepped pyramid. Just below this sculptural hairline is the outline of the Golden Gate bridge, scratched into the figure’s skin tone, suggesting the merging of ancient and modern monuments–a sensibility that weaves itself through the playfully rough work of San Francisco-based artist Isaac Vazquez Avila. The artist’s latest body of work which combines both figurative and abstract works realized in oil paint, pastel and graphite on canvas, embody a “rasquache” sensibility—what Chicano scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto describes as “the perspective of the underdog”. The faces of Avila’s figures are mask- like, comprised of angular features and sunken eyes, with subtle messages such as “Todo Bien” and “2018 Feb” inscribed within their flesh, eyes and mouths. With vitality they reapproach and dance about the fraught histories of modernist abstraction and their relation to the appropriation of indigenous forms of making, continuing the artist’s examination of tensions between dominant and nondominant cultures in an exploration of the in-between.