Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales: Echoes

839 is pleased to announce Echoes by Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together cyanotypes, sculptural vessels, and a multimedia installation that reflects Wallace-Gonzales’s ongoing interest in transformation, ancestry, and the interplay between human and natural forms. Across these works, she examines the material and symbolic residues that mark personal and collective change. 

The color blue recurs throughout the exhibition: as matte ultramarine in ceramic surfaces, as with Chrysalis Vessel Three (2024), and within the distinct solar-exposed hue of the artist’s cyanotypes, such as A Conversation With The Butterflies in My Mother’s Garden (2022). Wallace-Gonzales foregrounds the physical properties of nature: sunlight, pigment, the human body, alongside foraged plants and butterflies, demonstrating how they can be used to imprint, stain, or fossilize memory. Her cyanotypes place her in dialogue with a long tradition of photographic experimentation with botanical material, from the 19th-century studies of Anna Atkins to more recent artists like James Welling. Her work also offers a rejoinder to violent histories embedded in the color blue in Western art: from Yves Klein’s anthropometries to the colonial economies that traded in the scarce and coveted ultramarine pigment. In Wallace-Gonzales’s hands, blue becomes a site of memory and rootedness.

Influenced by Saidiya Hartman’s practice of “critical fabulation,” a method which blends research with storytelling to address the silences left by the legacy of slavery, Wallace-Gonzales draws on her own diasporic heritage to build a visual archive that resists linear narrative. Her resin-cast sculpture suspends fragments between emergence and dissolution. Her translucent paper sculptures, like Primordial Residues (2025), challenge perspective and dimensionality. She often centers the chrysalis as a symbol of bodily metamorphosis and spiritual continuity. Her figurative approach shares affinities with Wangechi Mutu and David Hammons in its integration of the body, found material, and layered historical references. With a focus on mythology and the natural world, Wallace-Gonzales engages the poetics of visibility.

20% of all sales from the exhibition will benefit the Immigrant Defense Fund via the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). In light of recent ICE-led kidnappings targeting working-class immigrant communities across Southern California, this contribution affirms a shared commitment to community protection, mutual aid, and immigrant justice.