LACMA

there —pushing against power." Estrada is interested in accumulations rather than representations, or, as he puts it, "history at a subatomic level." His powerful yet ambiguous forms want to capture those qualities of resistance or strength that exceed historical accounts. In Identity 1 (1997), painted heads and amorphous shapes made out of Hydrocal, a type of modified gypsum often used by the artist, are connected with a complex grid of tubing so that they resemble thought bubbles and catheters—both externalized signs of the inner workings of a body in action. This more abstract form of portraiture has given way to one the artist considers more "concrete." Keeping his studio in the garage of his suburban home in the San Fernando Valley, Estrada continues to work diligently if a bit reclusively. He is currently producing an installation about "desire and disorder" that comprises paintings, drawings, and digitally created collages. The portraiture comes out of both his immediate surroundings and the people in his life as well as his own mental storehouse of abject imagery. This is a more medita- tive approach to portraiture that can allow for his lived expe- rience as well as make space for the less savory forms and expressions that have always populated his work.—RITA GONZALEZ Beginning with the title of his MFA thesis at Art Center College of Design, The Possibility of Mutation (1988), one could get a sense of Victor Estrada's multifarious concerns. He initially considered himself a painter, but as his thick accumulations of paint began to extend off the wall and on to the floor, he realized he was in a new territory. He was creating liminal objects—neither fully sculpture nor wholly painting. Estrada's heterodox approach also applies to his references and interests, which are a mix of art historical and vernacular cultural artifacts. His sources of inspiration veer to other disciplines; he is more apt to discuss the late Afrobeat icon and political figure Fela Kuti or a book by a neuroscientist than he is to mention the name of a painter or sculptor. Estrada's first major exposure was in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s. The exhibition's catalogue linked his work with that of Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, and Robert Williams for their shared grappling with the underdeveloped and the adolescent. One of Estrada's contributions to Helter Skelter was Baby/Baby (1991), an overgrown two-headed infant conjoined by a towering phallus. A prepatory drawing for the thirty-foot sculpture, reprinted in the catalogue, includes quota- tions from the song "Don't Let No One Get You Down" by the multiracial rock group War and the cribbed lyrics "Drifting on a Memory" from a song by the Isley Brothers—both standards on lowrider oldies radio playlists. Estrada's penchant for the sounds and visual displays of cholo romance, as well as his psychedelic twisting of these expressions of longing, keep company with the musical appropriations of Frank Zappa, especially his 1968 fake doo-wop recording Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, as well as the self-defined "schizo-ethnic" aesthetics of painter John Valadez. Estrada has consistently stayed away from identifying himself as a Chicano artist. However, he is interested in the expansive possibilities that come from fusions of images and texts taken from Mexican comics, graffiti, prison tattoos, Latin American postmodern novels, and, as he puts it, other "weird expressions of form." In this sense, his art anticipates the eccentric concerns of Arturo Ernesto Romo and Jason Villegas. His 1990 piece, For MLK, an inscrutable hot pink form somewhere between an elephant and a cannon, contains a small amulet paying homage to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In this piece and on an invitation for a solo show, Dr. King's image appears as a way to signal in the artist's words "the force that kept pushing it out 144 VICTOR ESTRADA

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