January 23, 2022 — March 5, 2022

Coda by Selva Aparicio

Coda is a site-specific solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Selva Aparicio that focuses on the ephemerality of life and the temporality of its vessels. This is the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles.

Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and performance to create artwork that digs deeper into ideas of memory, death, intimacy and mourning. Born and raised in the woods just outside of Barcelona, Spain, she found solace in nature from a young age and cultivated a profound interest in life and death as inspired by the natural world around her.

Working with nature’s ephemera, including cicada wings, lettuce leaves, oyster shells and human cadavers, her praxis is an extended death ritual which foregrounds a particular reverence for the deceased and discarded. Aparicio’s keen perception of the meanings imbued in these materials and the rituals informing their sentimentality lends a unique perspective to her practice and allows her to present their reimagined forms not as entombments but rather as moments that capture both the donor’s and the artist’s labor to hold space and time for viewers to reckon with life, death, and human objecthood. Themes that have become increasingly complex as her personal and professional experiences more frequently intersect with global issues like climate change, overpopulation, and extinction. Through projects like Transformaciones, Remains, Integumentum, Hysteria, and memorialization efforts following the Barcelona terrorist attack of August 2017, her practice has evolved beyond the individual to encompass environmental, social, and political activism and evoke the change and rebirth she witnesses in nature. She returned to cadaver work this year through a piece titled Hopscotch for the Museum of Contemporary Art; unveiled against the backdrop of pervasive, mainstream death that is the COVID-19 pandemic, her art took on a new significance as a public outlet for the navigation of grief and loss on such a large scale.

Aparicio received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2017. Her work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art; Can Mario Museum, Spain; CRUSH Curatorial, New York; Roots & Culture, Chicago; The Kyoto International Craft Center, Japan; Instituto Cervantes, New York; and the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona. She was awarded the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights in 2016, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize in 2017, and received a MAKER Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2020. She was also named one of the 2020 breakout artists in Chicago by NewCity Art and is a current artist-in-residence at the BOLT studio program, working towards a solo exhibition in February 2022.