LACMA

58 Victor Estrada's work first received widespread critical attention in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, the 1992 exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that was mentioned by a number of artists in Phantom Sightings as instrumental to their artistic formation. Helter Skelter, perhaps one of the first exhibitions on Los Angeles art to curate across "high and low" forms, delved into the freeform exchange that had long existed in literary, musical, and artistic circles. Estrada's sculptures and paintings brought forth the gothic and gangrene that was in the 1990s—and arguably still is—this city's art profile. Even today, Estrada's practice emerges from the urge to let street aesthetics blend into the morass of dream content. Old English lettering and drawings that feature Chicana homegirls with thick eyeliner are paired with monstrous forms that take as their theoretical inspiration the abject dimensions of French surrealist writer Georges Bataille, the corporeal philosophies of Mikhail Bakhtin, and the tragicomic register of the Chicano aphorism "Smile now, cry later." In the 1990s, critics took note of Estrada's liminal forms, addressing them in relation to postmodernism and the transforming shape of identity and beauty in contemporary art. One writer discussed Estrada's raucous biomorphic forms as "life in unfamiliar shapes." But these unfamiliar forms may have had to do as much with Estrada's polymath interests as with the place where he grew up and found himself after art school. Even Estrada has drawn comparisons between the lack of stable forms in his art and his immediate surroundings, the San Fernando Valley. "The Valley," as it is referred to in the vernacular, is an enclave of Los Angeles that has changed radically over the last two decades, growing in population and becoming more ethnically diverse. As the artist once remarked, "Change is not controlled here. Anxiety about that change is reflected in my work." 33 READERS OF SURFACE GEOGRAPHIES Informal and illicit economies, mobility, and the decentering of identity and land- based claims once associated with the Chicano movement have contributed to both the reshaping of cultural production and urban space. 34 In a recent essay, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto links contemporary Latino cultural expression to "an incipient transnational imaginary." Whereas immigration has often been allegorized in artworks by diaspora artists with an emphasis on dislocation and disaffection, Ybarra-Frausto asserts that "today's Latino(a) culture is nurtured within translocal spaces and is vibrant in the formation of new, mobile identities, nascent coalitions and solidarities, and possible social formations of connection, communication, and conciliation within national groups and across borders." 35 It could be argued that these affinities and sympathetic tunings are no better played out than by exchanges between those who have grown up as hyphenated "Americans" and those of their native countries. A number of artists in Phantom Sightings deal with that predicament of allegiance and their own distance from or close proximity to migrancy and nationalism. Victor Estrada, Mr. Casper, 1997, ink on paper, 14 x 11 in.

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