Borrowed Recipes brings together six artists—Anna Sew Hoy, Carmen Argote, David Alekhuogie, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Jesse Chun, and Patricia Fernández—whose works divulge inherited knowledge, sensibilities, mores, and values, across aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual vectors.
The working title for this show was Family Recipe. Inspired by the way rafa esparza describes making adobe—a “family recipe,” learned from his father—the exhibition traces familial influences and multifarious inheritances that bleed into art-making. We inherit names, physiognomy. We inherit sense memory from the umwelt created by our caretakers, shaping our palates and tastes. We inherit accents and dialects, often weathered down over time—diasporic losses, words and spices are relinquished in the name of assimilation. We inherit (that) loss. We inherit know-how, wisdom, recipes. Some knowledge is not passed on due to gendered notions; some is self-censored, traits are stanched off. We inherit myths and superstitions, stories we are told. The stories alter over time, from generation to generation, as bits are preserved, parts excised, pieces embellished and riffed on. Like recipes.
From direct homage to uncanny regurgitation, intergenerational ties are cited and unpacked, and at times revised, in the works in Borrowed Recipes. A tapestry of interwoven inheritances, with gaps and frayed edges, emerges as a reminder that our stories, selves, and inheritances cannot be represented in any linear etiological narrative.
The title of the show is borrowed from a work by David Alekhuogie. In recent work, the artist turned his camera lens on his parents’ heritages. Studying his mother’s cooking, Alekhuogie traced the lineage of soul food in his life. Through his signature practice of rephotography, ingredients, cookbooks, and finished dishes are juxtaposed with Ankara fabrics sourced from trips to Nigeria, from where his father hails. At times, the artist prints resulting images on fabric which is then draped and sewn, in an oblique tribute to the African American quilting traditions practiced by his mother and sister. Hewing to the artist’s hip-hop sensibility, Alekhuogie samples from visual life around him. Staging, photographing, rearranging, and reshooting, he blurs the boundaries between the real and constructed, remixing his own truth of his legacies.
Interlaced influences also appear in the works of Carmen Argote and Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. Argote marries distinct inheritances in her body of work Searching for the Willow Pattern. Long bolts of linen, punctuated by varying styles of pockets sewn by the artist’s mother and grandmother, are stained with ceramic oxides. Originally conceived to be shown in Hong Kong, the work was inspired by research into the global trade routes that built the modern economies and the cultural exchanges between Spain, Asia, and the Middle East. Cascading down from high, the pockets recall balconies; the pieces nod to the ubiquitous skyscrapers that crowd the Hong Kong urbanscape, and to the artist’s father’s dreams of being an architect.
Aparicio’s paintings memorialize trees slated to be cut down, fellow immigrants in the city of Los Angeles. Rubber casts narrate the life of a tree, its bark, carved scars, graffiti, and soot—records of the tree’s interactions with the city and its denizens. The rubber is reinforced with fabric, often sourced from the artist’s friends and family or salvaged from the neighborhoods where the trees lived. For No seas traumado, a painting by Aparicio’s father depicting the type of doll the artist’s grandmother made adjoins the rubber. Onto that canvas, Aparicio paints signs and logos often found in El Salvador and its diaspora, the imbrication of multigenerational creative expressions across artmaking and domestic crafts that tell a story of aesthetic lineage, intrafamilial, and cultural. The blanket stitch around the work securing the edges recalls the sewing style of the artist’s grandmother, osmotically learned and unconsciously reproduced.
A grandmother’s subliminal influence is present in Jesse Chun’s work too. Interested in the slippages and possibilities of language, Chun recently returned to a radically transformed Korea to reconnect with her ancestral roots, particularly the life of her late grandmother, a folk dancer turned Buddhist monk. The artist, through inexplicable intuition, searched for and found a notebook of letters her grandmother left for her. Contending with these inheritances and communicating with her grandmother across temporal, life/afterlife divides, Chun assembles linguistic ensemble on music stands that hold up pages from grandmother’s letters, photographs, strips of hanbok silk, and rocks, creating a poetic reader for an ineffable dialogue. In another work entitled 시: concrete poem, Chun draws from another inheritance—Korean shamanic papercutting—to make her own abstract language. The form of papercutting, traditionally used to communicate across time and place during ceremonies and as a talisman for protection, was taught to Chun by a local shaman in South Korea. Chun reinterprets this tradition to make her own asemic writing that draws from the diasporic and cosmic conditions of language. Assiduously lining Korean mulberry paper in graphite, a repetitive practice to achieve a meditative state, the resulting works are portals, communing with the past and alternate worlds/selves.
A spine of bones or tree stumps lies prostrate on the gallery floor. Prone, by Anna Sew Hoy, comprises ceramic components with an active surface bearing scratches, scrapes, finger impressions, and divots. Glazed in pink using the rare-earth mineral erbium, red, brown, and buff clay shows through the translucent surface, evoking an uncanny body. Interested in the body’s relationship to objects, and to physical and psychic space, Sew Hoy’s work reveals aesthetic predilections formed in her childhood, when her father, an orthopedic surgeon, gave her plastic and stainless-steel hip replacement parts to play with. Bone shapes recur in the artist’s visual language, vestigial clues to her inheritance. In Borrowed Recipes, Prone is a ceramic spine which holds the space of the gallery.
Patricia Fernández, whose decade-long project Box (a proposition for ten years)—itself a receptacle for inheritances to the Commonwealth and Council community—culminates in the gallery next door, pays tribute to her late grandfather, José Luis Carcedo, through woodcarving. Having grown up watching her grandfather in Burgos, Spain carve boxes and clocks for friends and family, the artist took up carving as an adult, following a family recipe if you will (though her grandfather never taught her directly). Her carving struck up a new material conversation with her grandfather, who sent his new drawings for patterns as his own carving abilities atrophied. Thus they marked time together, one “X” shaped carved star at a time. In untitled (window frame) by Fernández and Carcedo, a patchworked frame holds an etching by Francisco Goya, from his controversial Los caprichos series skewering the decadence and follies of his time. Art history too, a seemingly resolute monolith, is inherited. Perhaps as with other inheritances, the so-called canon can be borrowed like a recipe and made our own, together.
Anna Sew Hoy (b. 1976, Auckland; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from Bard College (2008) and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (1998). Sew Hoy is faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions have been held at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2019, 2015); Campbell Hall Art Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Koenig & Clinton, New York (2016); Aspen Art Museum (2015); San Jose Museum of Art (2011); Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., New York (2010); Renwick Gallery, New York (2008); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2008). Selected Group exhibitions have been held at Albertz Benda, Los Angeles (2023); Jason Jacques Gallery, New York (2023); American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Galerie Marguo, Paris (2022); Moràn Moràn, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2021); Sokyo Gallery, Kyoto (2021); Koenig & Clinton, New York (2019); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016); and Hammer Museum (2014). Sew Hoy is a recipient of Fellows of Contemporary Art Grant (2023), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2022), Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2021), Creative Capital Grant for Visual Artists (2015), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).
Sew Hoy’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2007) and a BFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2004). Solo exhibitions have been held at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2022); Primary, Nottingham (2021); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2020); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2020, 2018); New Museum, New York (2019); and PAOS, Guadalajara (2019). Selected group exhibitions have been held at MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); SculptureCenter, Queens (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and Ballroom Marfa (2017). Argote is a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2019), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).
Argote’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach.
David Alekhuogie (b. 1986, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from Yale University (2015) and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013). Solo exhibitions have been held at Assembly, Houston (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2022, 2019); Yancey Richardson, New York (2021); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2019); Company Gallery, New York (2019); Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles (2017); and Chicago Artist Coalition (2016). Selected group exhibitions have been held at MoMA, New York (2020); High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2017); Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (2015); and Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2015). Alekhuogie is a recipient of Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2019).
Alekhuogie’s work is in the collections of Everson Museum of Art; Fitchburg Art Museum; George Eastman Museum; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (b. 1990, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from Yale University (2016) and a BA from Bard College (2012). Solo exhibitions have been held at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Los Angeles State Historic Park, Clockshop (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2020); Páramo, Guadalajara (2019); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2018); and Green Gallery, New Haven (2016). Selected group exhibitions have been held at The Clark, Williamstown (2023); Denver Art Museum (2022); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2022); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2022); American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); El Museo del Barrio, New York (2021); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2020); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2019); Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2018); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn (2017); and Abrons Art Center, New York (2016). Aparicio is a recipient of California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2018) and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016).
Aparicio’s work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Jesse Chun (b. 1984, Seoul; lives and works in Seoul and New York) received an MFA from School of Visual Arts (2014) and BFA from Parsons School of Design (2007). Solo exhibitions have been held at Seoul Museum of Art (2023); 1708 Gallery, Richmond (2018); and Brownstone Gallery, New York (2016). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2023); De Appel, Amsterdam (2023); Ballroom Marfa (2023); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2021); SculptureCenter, Queens (2020); Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul (2020); NXTHVN, New Haven (2020); The Drawing Center, New York (2019); and Queens Museum (2018). Chun is a recipient of Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2020) and Triple Canopy Commission Award (2020). She has participated in residencies at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2024); the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship at ISCP, New York (2019) and The Drawing Center Open Sessions Fellowship (2018).
Chun’s work is in the collections of Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art Library, New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, New York; and Kadist Art Foundation.
Patricia Fernández (b. 1980, Burgos; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2010) and a BFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2002). Solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Mexico City (2023); Whistle, Seoul (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2024, 2021, 2018); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2021, 2016); Holiday Forever, Jackson Hole (2020); Todd Madigan Gallery, Bakersfield (2018); Museo de Arte Burgos (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and LAXART (2014). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2023, 2017); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro (2019); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); Obra, Malmö (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Fernández is a recipient of Otis College of Art and Design Faculty Development Grant (2021), Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2019), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2017-18), Speranza Foundation Lincoln City Fellowship (2015), France-Los Angeles Exchange Grant (2012), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2011). Fernández has participated in residencies at Forest Island, Mammoth Lakes (2018); Récollets, Paris (2016); D-Flat, Mexico City (2016); Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (2013).
Fernández’s work is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.