Vani Aguilar's Airbrushed Urban Vernacular
Installation view of Blinked Twice at Tala. Pictured Vani Aguilar's En donde nos Juntábamos (2024) at Tala. Photo by Steven Piper, courtesy of Tala.
One thing I remember most about growing up in Santa Ana, CA, is how people's front yards looked. Some were not visible as an agglomeration of plants and toys swallowed them up, and somehow, they became Rasquache-made gardens, neatly organized. Hominy metal cans and milk gallons were the pots and bricks served as plant stands. The front yard bore witness to special encounters, like birthday parties, and were a reflection of how people lived. When I arrived in Chicago, Santa Ana echoed around Pilsen and in Little Village. Both now prominently Latinx, these neighborhoods were once home to Polish and Italian immigrants and later to Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the early 1940s. Chicago felt familiar because of the similar ways people made sense of home.
With Blinked Twice, Vani Aguilar captures the networks between Chicago, where they previously lived, and Los Angeles, where they are from and currently reside. Curated by John H. Guevara, founder of Chuquimarca, Blinked Twice is Aguilar’s first solo exhibition. On view at Tala, an arts space with a mission to amplify artists in West Town Chicago, the exhibition features new and previously made works.
“And if you blink again you may miss the demolition of the structure you once knew as home. ”
The paintings document everyday moments—like two people sitting beside each other on a porch and three chihuahuas running around. But if you blink twice, you may miss the neighbors sparking their charcoal grill or, in a scene reminiscent of Qué Calor (2023), the señoras gossiping as they hold on to the fence because the chisme is that good. And if you blink again you may miss the demolition of the structure you once knew as home. These ephemeral moments happen as a neighborhood undergoes a rapid spatial and psychosocial shift. Blink twice and you will miss it.
Vani Aguilar, Qué Calor, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 30”x 40." Photo by Steven Piper. Courtesy of Tala.
While nothing stays the same, Aguilar's method of painting is a result of leaning into the familiar. “Airbrushing felt culturally familiar to me,” they tell Intervenxions. “I used to spray paint as a teen by making stencils and putting my art across the city. Airbrushing had a similar feel.” White pañuelos with intricate designs—often produced with ballpoint pens in carceral institutions—also served as inspiration.
During lockdown, they developed a habit of drawing. It became a way for the School of Art Institute of Chicago graduate to express their ideas and stay committed to their practice. Later, they translated their drawings into airbrushed T-shirts that they sold on their Instagram page. Their upbringing—spanning from Elysian Park to East Los Angeles—critically informs why they gravitated toward airbrushing. Continuing down this path through persistent practice is a way to hold onto working-class narratives of making. The accessible visual language of airbrush is everywhere—from lowrider culture to store signage to the customized white T-shirts one can get at the swap meet or the mall.
“The accessible visual language of airbrush is everywhere—from lowrider culture to store signage to the customized white T-shirts one can get at the swap meet or the mall. ”
When I entered Tala, a bright, well-curated atrium marketplace welcomed me. If you don’t linger among the generous selection of affordable, artist-made works and scents for long, you arrive at the main gallery space, where curator Guevara situated a set of three plastic chairs. Each faces different paintings by Aguilar. The white molded plastic chairs, reminding me of those neighborhood birthday parties, encouraged me to linger, pause, and observe the exhibition. The placement of the chairs challenge the frame of reference of the space by almost displacing us from the gallery and into someone’s yard or living room. One of the first chairs I sat on put me in front of Aguilar's largest work in the show, En donde nos Juntábamos (2024), a painting anchoring the memory of sitting on their uncle's stoop with their cousins.
The airiness with which Aguilar shapes bodies and architecture recalls how gentrification operates: It disappears what once was into thin air. Poof! As if like magic, the hybrid grocery-dollar store was never there. Playing with the mechanics of air, it is almost as if Aguilar airbrushes them back onto the canvas as a way to remember and breathe new life into what outside forces tried to extinguish.
“Living and teaching in Pilsen and Little Village, I got to enjoy and be warmed by those two neighborhoods’ idiosyncrasies while also carrying the pain of seeing the spaces continuing to change by the effects of gentrification.”
Aguilar's work may hold the weight of struggle, but most importantly, it celebrates the beauty that gives many Latinx neighborhoods their enchanting qualities. The paintings become assembled narratives between Aguilar’s time in Chicago and their return to Los Angeles. “Unlike LA, Chicago’s neighborhoods feel more segregated and less culturally diverse,” they say. “For better or for worse this is visible in each neighborhood’s pride for their culture and also drive to protect culturally significant spaces, [like a] swap meet [or] discount mall. Living and teaching in Pilsen and Little Village, I got to enjoy and be warmed by those two neighborhoods’ idiosyncrasies while also carrying the pain of seeing the spaces continuing to change by the effects of gentrification.”
These works are testaments to how Aguilar reconciles personal narratives of loss and placemaking. These themes are prominent in the painting En donde nos Juntábamos, which depicts two figures, the artist’s cousins, casually hanging out in front of Aguilar’s uncle's home. This house is formative in Aguilar’s life as it represents a space where their Mexican-American identity took shape while being in communion with the paternal side of their family. But the dirt that once nourished their family and the avocado, lemon, and lime trees will soon become a multifamily unit housing complex. What remains is this painting and a photograph in Aguilar’s possession of a demolished home where what most stands out are the brown dirt in the background and the power lines attached to what remains of a home.
Vani Aguilar, Love don’t Live there, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 30”x 40". Photo by Steven Piper. Courtesy of Tala.
Vani Aguilar, Blue everywhere, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 22”x 28". Photo by Steven Piper. Courtesy of Tala.
If you blink twice you may also miss the visible complex in the background of the painting entitled Love don’t Live there (2024). While you have to scan the painting closely, many things begin to emerge when you carefully observe it, like the bitten guava—a symbol of the fruit trees that feed Latinx and immigrant neighborhoods across the country. While the painting references a specific fence in Chicago, it could be any fence from Chicago to Los Angeles. It’s how Aguilar orients us toward a lexicon of symbols that make up the lush vibrant neighborhoods in which they have lived. The copper earth-tone red fence becomes a signifier of life that working-class labor made possible. “Fences [are] a recurring device in the works . . . by forefronting a decorative rusted-color fence as seen in Love don’t Live there, the orange, sun-kissed fence …creates a warm security system on the objects,” Guevara says in the press release for the show. “By sharing similar alloy-like properties, the figures, the objects, and the fences can be imagined to come from the same material and source.”
This painting is key to Aguilar's communication, taking this new direction of collaging and blurring boundaries of place and creating a third imaginative space to gather in and contemplate. Rather than focusing on a specific neighborhood, the coded elements within the painting multiply into shared experiences that exist everywhere across the country. Aguilar directs us toward forms of placemaking within Latinx communities amidst the shifting architecture of the neighborhood. Although still looming, the facade of the newly constructed building is aspiringly fading into the background.
If we move one more time onto a different chair, we see the sharp blue painting entitled Blue everywhere (2024) that notes, “Danger, hard hat area.” Aguilar's hyperreal, almost silky saturated blue tone painting encourages me to ask: What more could possibly lie behind the blue construction tarp other than the brown and green landscape? It is as if pulling the tarp would reveal the answers to gentrification or what was once there.
The inability to see how high the fence may stretch in the painting also demonstrates how development works––you never know how high or far it will go. Leaving these methods of mechanized construction to the imagination threatens the livelihood of the neighborhood and erases the yards one grows accustomed to seeing, ultimately shifting the entire character of the city. “My mind pops up with what used to be there, and who is going to have access to the space after the new development,” Aguilar says. More than anything, these plastic covers and temporary fences bring more anxiety than solutions everywhere from Pilsen to Elysian Park.
Blinked Twice is on view at Tala until October 6, 2024.
Xavier Robles Armas is a multidisciplinary artist and curator with a focus on public space, photography, and how migration shapes architecture in the U.S. He is currently the Events and Arts Manager at the Latinx Project, NYU, where he curated Tinkuy: Converging Ecologies (2023) and supported exhibitions like Re-collections (2024). A recent Leadership Institute Fellow at NALAC (2024), Xavier has also been part of the inaugural cohort of Latinx curators in the A&L Berg Foundation’s Early Stage Arts Professionals program (2024). He has held fellowships at the Queens Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, and worked with various institutions as a curator, educator, and programmer. Xavier is pursuing an MA in Performance Studies at NYU, holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Architectural Studies from Hampshire College. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Xavier lives in Queens, New York—by way of Santa Ana, California.
