Abraham Cruzvillegas: Autoconcanción
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90038
September 17 – October 22, 2016

There are lines of floating iron in view from the entrance. Attached to the contour of a car’s backseat, the metal rods appear exceedingly high and peninsular. A wooden crown sits atop with the green of a succulent plant poking through. When closer, one sees there is a small transistor radio strung on an arch of the iron, softly tuned to a classical music station. It is a sculpture to rest in, it is a place of urban reuse and vegetative strivings, it is a historical welding of the present.

Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconcanción III, 2016. Steel, wood, plants, cloth, vinyl, plastic, metal, elastic, polyester, portable radio. Photo Credit: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Abraham Cruzvillegas’s latest exhibition at Regen Projects is in homage to home and the specificity of the present. In particular, Mexico City D.F and Los Angeles are wedded in his towering sculptures of metal, flora, and lumber.

Several pieces incorporate car backseats, old and worn, as the structural base with cages of recycled iron erected as exaggerations of auto chassis. Radios are incorporated in nearly every sculpture and are tuned to Spanish talk radio, cumbia, and other local stations. The mix of reuse and the form of the figures are aesthetic attempts at a more functional and sonorous commodity. They are for lying in, sitting in, for development and vigilance, for repair and benign neglect. Cruzvillegas presents dynamic ways for bodies to interact with already known objects, querying the use value and capital of salvaged parts.

Abraham Cruzvillegas, (Installation view of Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconcanción at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. September 17 – October 22, 2016. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

This feel of new values or, rather, the vitality of the forgotten carries throughout the gallery. In one corner is a spill of metal bars then welded into place as they fell and a collapsed wooden post has a mass of sprouting leaves budding. Native palms and succulents dangle from every angle and sculpture while a green space is set up as a dedicated dry nursery. It was as if the industrial landscapes of Los Angeles and D.F and their exhaust-laden air were being exercised through the tufts and bushes of greenery emerging from each piece.

Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconcanción VI, 2016. Steel, wood, plants, vinyl, cloth, foam, metal, polyester, elastic, portable radio. Photo Credit: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles