James Garcia Estructuras
December 3rd – January 1st, 2022
Opening Friday December 3rd 6 – 9 PM
Born: El Monte, CA
April 12, 1997 6:11 am
Sun: Aries 23° 10’
Moon: Cancer 4° 18’
Venus: Aries 25° 41’
From the very beginning, people stopped to wonder who James Garcia was on his way to becoming. His tiny body was raised into the air almost as high as their hopes before he came to rest in his parents’ arms. Arriving just as the sun was setting, very few people who were present for his birth even noticed that the air had chilled or that the sky had darkened because Garcia seemed to hold the sun’s memory in his eyes.
As he grew it was that spark that he turned on the world around him uncovering unusual or shrouded corners to illuminate, the way the lighting of a candle suddenly unlocks a dark room. Time runs on through a number of obstacles. But photography gave a place for the moments he held in his loving perception an enduring home in which to live and breathe.
At the time of Garcia’s birth, Saturn, the planet symbolic of boundaries and the passage of time, among other things, was in its fall in the sign of Aries. This symbol may describe what Garcia is sifting for in the images he depicts– material on its way to collapse, holding subjects in the moment where their strength is beginning to yield to something softer. The photograph seems to offer reassurance to the subject, even the inanimate ones, at a moment of yielding under the weight of something beyond their control.
On December 3rd as the Moon comes to meet the Sun in the sign of Sagittarius and a solar eclipse forms, James Garcia’s show Estructuras opens. Eclipses reverberate like cymbals crashing together– there is a stillness that gathers around this collision, a tension that gradually releases and radiates. Given these astrological omens, Garcia’s show may have a similar impact in the world in which it is received, but also within the individual viewer. Beyond the walls of the gallery is where viewers have the opportunity to see their environment in the way Garcia’s photographs have instructed them, through a lens of tender compassion towards that which is in the vulnerable process of surrender.
Estructuras marks Garcia’s second solo exhibition following his debut in 2019 at Queens Los Angeles. That same year, his work was featured in a project organized by Paul Mpagi Sepuya for the Whitney Biennial. He is self-taught.
