In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Los Angeles based photographer Javier Estrada.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with Javiera Estrada, a Los Angeles based photographer with roots in Acapulco. She currently has an exhibit running at the Jonathan Carver Moore gallery in San Francisco entitled Back to the Future: Life in Technicolor.
About Artist Javier Estrada:
Multi-media artist, Javiera Estrada, was born in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1981 and emigrated to the United States in 1989. Javiera’s broad scope of work, which includes photography, mixed media, photograms, film, and textiles, is influenced by her memories of growing up in Acapulco—a tropical paradise of vibrant colors, steeped in spiritual ritual and magical realism.
Estrada’s mystical affinity for bridging the gap between the conscious landscape of reality and the subconscious world of the spiritual can be seen throughout her work. Philosophically, Estrada rejects Cartesian dualism and its compartmentalization of the whole, embracing a worldview of interconnectivity and unity consciousness. Artistically, she seeks to unify the mundane and the sacred.
Javiera examines the theme of interconnected consciousness in a multitude of ways. From incorporating female bodies as sculptural forms in organic communion with nature, to creating galactic primordial environments with inks—fluid and formless, structures representing the “prima materia,” original essence of existence. The juxtaposition of shadow and light play a recurring role in Estrada’s explorations as well, representing the internal struggle between the spiritual and the physical.
Estrada describes her artistic process as both frenzied and laborious. The work is multi-layered and time-consuming, a technique she sees as inducing presence, while moving away from the high-speed nature of the digital age. The initial messy, chaotic stage of unknowing is essential to Estrada’s process, as it allows for connection with the deeper, subconscious elements wanting to emerge through the work.
Estrada has exhibited in the United States, Europe (London, Germany, China, Switzerland) and Singapore. In 2020, her solo show in Las Vegas received a Certificate of Special Congressional Commendation for the Arts from the United States Congress. Recently, she was commissioned to create a site-specific piece for the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Estrada currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Visit Javiera's Website: JavieraEstrada.com
Follow Javiera on Social Media: @JavieraEstradaArtist
For more info on her exhibit Back to the Future: Life in Technocolor visit the Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-1121 - AIA - EP014 - Javiera Estrada
Artist Javiera Estrada: [00:00:00] I started using a lot of color and going super vibrant with my color. I just wanted to create more uplifting, energetic work. And I still have that side of me, that very traditional black and white portrait, silver gelatin, but there's something about color that's. Exciting and uplifting that's artist
Host Emily Wilson: Javiera Estrada on her vivid, hypersaturated photos of nature
Host Emily Wilson:
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco covering the arts, I see so many hardworking artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area, and I wanted people to know about them.
So I came up with Art is Awesome.[00:01:00]
Los Angeles artist Javier Estrada loves photography, nature and making art. She combined those in her show, Back to the Future, Life in Technicolor, at Jonathan Carver Moore, a gallery on Market Street in San Francisco. The show has hyper pigmented photos, many taken at national parks, as well as photos of people with their bodies painted.
There's also a tapestry of cyanotypes, or prints made without a darkroom. Javiera talked about how as a kid in Acapulco, she would do things like flood her apartment trying to make an indoor swimming pool, or break plates, just because she liked the sound. She also spoke about her love of color, making wearable art, and how a gift from her aunt.[00:02:00]
Artist Javiera Estrada: I don't like my mind to get involved in my creative process because she is trouble. You know, it's too much. I'll criticize. I'll overanalyzed because I'm an analyzer. So I'll just pick it apart. So instead, what works for me is to literally just be like, I want to do these beautiful, super saturated, colorful nature shots and also some body painting.And I just kind of went from there. I just had these visions and these visuals.
Host Emily Wilson: Since she was a little girl, Javiera knew what she wanted to do.
Artist Javiera Estrada: I've always wanted to be an artist since I can remember. That's the first thing I said when you're like, I want to be a blah, a police officer. People was, Nope. I was like, I want to be an artist.
And then the next thing was, I want to be a ballerina because my mom was a dancer, but that's a much harder path. So when I was six, I was always creative. I got into a lot of trouble with my [00:03:00] creativity. Painting on walls and creating installations that were not safe in my house and things like that. Uh, and then my aunt, who's an architect for my 16th birthday, she gifted me her beautiful Nikon film camera with all her lenses.
It was an, a Nikon FE2. That was my first. And she had no idea what she did for me. I mean, that changed the trajectory of my life.
Host Emily Wilson: Many of the hyper pigmented photos in the show were taken in national parks like Bryce in Utah. People need a connection with nature, Javier, I think. And she hopes the images of say, magenta trees and pink mountains will make them consider it in a new way.
Artist Javiera Estrada: A lot of people don't even see the sun, you know, for days. I don't think that's healthy. So what I'm posing here and back to the future is when I say back to the future, I'm saying, let's go back in time and [00:04:00] Let's bring back the things that from our ancient cultures that worked, right? That brought us connection, that brought us unity.
Host Emily Wilson: One of those things is body painting. Javiera stands in front of an image of two women with a modern white building behind them. One of them is covered in dabs of red paint and the other in blue dabs.
Artist Javiera Estrada: The body painting is based on ancient rituals of body paint in order to create intimacy and unity among different tribes.So there were tribes when they would come together, you know, they had their separate. And in order to bond and not feel like they're separate tribes, they would paint each other the same to have connection. And I found that to be really beautiful.
Host Emily Wilson: There's also a photo of a geyser in Yellowstone National Park in bright blue, yellow, and purple.
Artist Javiera Estrada: Yellowstone is one of the most magical places on the planet. I love anything that [00:05:00] makes you feel Like going back in ancient time and Yellowstone is one of the oldest places. It has the most concentration of. natural geysers in the world. And there's something very primordial about spending time in Yellowstone.
And it's very healing for your nervous system. It's like the Disneyland of nature. You go there and you think you've seen one geyser, you’ve seen them all, but it's like, you haven't, it's like, this one's the prismatic and it's all these different watermelon colors. And then you've got the shooting one that's called the Lone Star guys, and you've got the babies and then you've got mud, like the painted clay pots, which are like spewing and they look otherworldly.
It looks like you're on another planet going there. I shot there because again, it kind of brings back that ancient feeling. And I would say. One of the themes in all of my work is this timelessness and marrying that prima materia, like the beginning of time, that primordial spiritual [00:06:00] essence. And that is a through line throughout all my work, whether it's a nude or an abstract or a landscape.
Host Emily Wilson: Along with the photos, a large tapestry made of dozens and dozens of cyanotypes hangs in the show. Javiera talked about the process of making them.
Artist Javiera Estrada: They're chemically treated pieces of fabric and I do them one at a time. They're light sensitive. So they come in this black bag I do it in my bedroom because my bedroom is next to my back door Patio, so I have blackout curtains I will set up on my table all this these clipboards with the cyanotypes and then I start making my You know, my images, whether I place plants or chains or different textures, I also create wet cyanotype.
So I don't do just regular cyanotypes. Like this one's a, this is a traditional cyanotype, right? It's just. It's the blue and white. [00:07:00] And then when you see this kind of color palette, which is more of this murky green and, you know, kind of more exciting things going on, that's when I wet the physical fabric.
And I also start adding Baking soda and salt and herbs and spices to see how it reacts and dish soap. So this kind of green color palette is because of dish soap.
Host Emily Wilson: Javiera says she loves working with Sienna types because she never knows what she'll get.
Artist Javiera Estrada: I love that element of. Surprise, because that's the thing about technology. Most of the time it's so precise and that's why I love shooting film too. It's exciting. I don't have full control. I'm a control freak in nature. I love that. I don't have full control over it. It keeps me present and makes me surrender to the creative process. In order to get the imprint, you put a piece of glass on top of it. So it presses down and then you expose it to the sun and you rinse it out [00:08:00] with water. And that's a cyanotype. They're so fun.
Host Emily Wilson: She proposed doing cyanotypes for the first time as a group project when she'd never done them
Artist Javiera Estrada: before. How I started this process was I was commissioned by this, uh, university in Switzerland, St. Gallen. And they said to me, we love your art. And they saw my wearable arcs, I paint on upcycled vintage jackets. And they said, we'd love to have your work. Would you come over? And I was like, yes. And then I said, well, what's the theme of your symposium? And they said, oh, it's at the collaborative initiative.
And I was like, well. This doesn't make sense to have wearable art. How about I collaborate with the students and we create, and by the way, I'd never done a cyanotype in my life, which is so weird that I hadn't. And I proposed, I was like, let's make a cyanotype tapestry. Never made one before. And they were like, yes, we love this idea.
Host Emily Wilson: Her process of making art, both with the photos and the tapestry is time consuming.
Artist Javiera Estrada: [00:09:00] Something that's really important to me is to separate myself from this modern technology of like rush, rush, rush, efficiency, fast computers. That's why I shoot film, because it slows you down. And, uh, you gotta be really meticulous.
You get very present when you're shooting. And same with this. I like anything that gets my hands working. Like, I'm very tactile with my hands. And so, anything that slows me down, I'm interested in.
Host Emily Wilson: Although Javiera sometimes works in black and white, she loves using color.
Artist Javiera Estrada: Growing up in Acapulco, everything is so colorful.
I, you know, I grew up in a pink building and the Day of the Dead festival, it's like there's all these orange flowers and it's just a tropical paradise. It's so beautiful in the Bougainvillea and it's like this hot pink magenta, you know, which is, I'm obsessed with magenta. That's like my new favorite. I had a shift in 2015 and I started using a lot of color and going super, super vibrant with my [00:10:00] color.
I just wanted to create more uplifting, energetic work. And I still have that side of me, that very traditional black and white portrait, silver gelatin, which I'll never stop doing. But there's something about color that's exciting and uplifting.
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, Three Questions, where I ask the artists the same three questions to learn more about them. When did you know you were an artist? What work made an impression on you? And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area? Except since Javiera lives in Los Angeles, she answered what was the most inspiring for her there.
You probably won't be surprised that our answers have to do with art and nature.
Artist Javiera Estrada: I knew I was an artist when I was six years old. [00:11:00] And it's funny, I tell this story a lot, but much to my mother's chagrin, I, I got in a lot of trouble. I would just get these wild ideas. Oh, wouldn't it be fun to create an indoor pool? And I'd bring my little blow up pool and I was like, why isn't it filling up?
Hours later, and then. Flooded the entire apartment or like I would be on a ladder next to the mango tree And this is a Mexico and and I'd be like smashing plates and she's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, the sound is so beautiful. I loved the sound of breaking glass or I would like light up firework like I try to light up a Firework inside my house.
I mean, the things that I've done weren't malicious. I was just inspired and my creativity just got me into a lot of trouble. Oh, and I loved drawing. I would draw my own, which is funny that this ties in now, but I would draw my own. I loved fashion even as a young child and I would [00:12:00] create my own designs.
Before I committed my path to fine art, I was also doing commercial photography. So I did fashion and editorials and, you know, I just love beautiful things and beautiful clothes. And, and so Tim Walker. Is a genius and he does everything in camera. He, he creates, which is, I'm also like this. He creates his own props and he's got a full team and it's very magical and surreal.
He shoots film and he does it all in natural light. And that's all my vibes. And it's very whimsical and, uh, and sparkly and fun. Quirky, so he's definitely an inspiration for me even even though I'm not doing fashion anymore I really appreciate what he's what he's creating[00:13:00]
What is the most creatively inspiring place? For me, it's really when I'm in movement when I'm in movement. I'm very creatively inspired, you know, it's not necessarily a person particular place, but I will say my favorite places to spend time are museums. Like I love going to the Getty, you know, I love going to galleries.
I'm always inspired by seeing art. So any, anywhere there's art, I'm inspired and nature. Huntington gardens is just one of the most beautiful places. Anytime there's a garden or a museum in the city, I go.
Host Emily Wilson: Thanks for listening to Art is Awesome. And thanks to our guest Javier Estrada. Her show Back to the Future Life in Technicolor is at Jonathan Carver Moore, a gallery on Market Street in San Francisco through January 7th. [00:14:00] If you like the show, please subscribe and rate us and join us next time when the guest is painter David Huffman.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquired his painting, Waterfall, and it's on view at the D. Young as part of the show, Crafting Radicality, until December 31st.
Art is Awesome is a biweekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Goto of Goto Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with Incompotech Music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.
Till next time.[00:15:00]