Adrián Esparza: Transfigurative

April 27 – June 2, 2013

Cindy Rucker Gallery presents Transfigurative, a solo exhibition of new work by Adrián Esparza. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

Transfiguration is told to be the miracle of Jesus Christ where Man meets God, the meeting place for the temporal and the eternal. Acting as the bridge between heaven and earth, Jesus is henceforth accepted as the messenger and mouthpiece of God. This exhibition questions who is the present day messenger by altered materials, which reveal his long focus on socio-political issues that characterize the contrarian nature of a society ruled by a class system ordered from the top down.

Esparza’s materials come from his surroundings, often the economically disparate culture of El Paso. Whether he is unweaving a bold patterned serape or grafting artifact and everyday objects, he joins the banal and revered to challenge the status quo. Reminiscent of graffiti, his process of transforming existing materials can lower or raise the items from out of its hierarchic level. In the title piece, he affixes colorful buttons of pop-culture icons to a religious banner, pin-pointing the culture shift from venerable to ego saturated. As a counterpart to transfiguration, Esparza then raises the quotidian to divine by painting a meandering motif on simple blankets and sheets.

Adrian Esparza currently lives and works in El Paso, TX where he was born in 1970. In 1996, he received a BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso, and then graduated in 1998 with an MFA from the California Institute for the Arts.