LACMA

94 Beginning in 2003, Ruben Ochoa, working with support from the Creative Capital Foundation and through the auspices of Caltrans, the state agency responsible for California's highways, conceptualized a number of projects titled Freeway Wall Extractions—outdoor projects in which he would apply large-scale, digitally printed photographic foliage to freeway barrier walls around Los Angeles, producing the illusion that part of the freeway wall had been taken away. One such Extraction was in fact realized in late 2006 along a section of Interstate 10 in East Los Angeles; some drivers who went looking for this well-publicized faux gap could not at first find it, specifically because it was so convincing, so "natural" in appearance, that it was difficult to notice and remained hidden in plain sight. Viewers who did perceive Ochoa's extraction saw a falsehood. The falsity is one with social and cultural overtones: "Walls may mean protection, as in retaining walls," observes Ochoa. "But they also indicate borders, keeping something out of the way…. Among their many purposes, freeways delineate neighborhoods." 3 Ochoa's aspiration is to blur the boundaries, to erase such dividing borders, to trespass against them, to pass through them imaginatively, if not in fact. Julio Cesar Morales also addresses the issue of barriers, in particular the steel and concrete ones erected by the United States separating its southern edge from Mexico. His Undocumented Interventions series (2005–8) was provoked by photo- graphs posted on the United States Customs and Border Protection website show- ing apprehended individuals attempting to cross into the U.S. concealed in objects. In one a child is hiding inside a large piñata; in another a person is disguised— improbably but resourcefully—as a car seat. Morales downloaded the images and then reproduced them as stylized, handpainted watercolors that have a dispassionate, almost clinical quality despite the pathos and desperation of their human subjects. Accompanying the watercolors is a video documenting an automobile ride from the border to the Tijuana neighborhood where there is an underground economy of altering vehicles and large appliances for purposes of human trafficking. Informal and phantom street economies are the subject of another series in which Morales photographed the customized pushcarts, assembled from found and prized automobile parts, used by street vendors in Tijuana, Los Angeles, and, increasingly, other U.S. cities with large Latino populations. Morales created diagrammatic outlines of design details of these pushcarts and subjected them to an algorithmic computer program in which the details come apart as random shapes, as if the pushcart had exploded in slow motion and, after floating randomly in space, slowly reconverged into a coherent shape. The perpetual shift between recognizability and visual chaos reflects the dynamism of street life and the commerce of makeshift opportunity and informal consumption that thrives yet remains invisible within the larger mainstream culture. History, like street life and underground economies, can also be of questionable visibility. The sorry, violent American history of white-on-black lynchings in the Southeastern states has been well documented, both by scholars looking back at Previous pages: • Adrian Esparza, Barrio of Earthly Delights, 2006

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