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In his artwork, Los Angeles-based artist and Skowhegan alumnus Danny Jauregui examines sites of monumentality, rupture, and obsolescence.  He merges geometric structures with gestural marks in explorations of the historical residues of architectural spaces. Jauregui construes his recent artistic practice as performing a "queering" of architecture. By this, he might be taken to mean several things. A young, gay, Chicano male, Jauregui takes the city of Los Angeles and its history as his topos, refracting it through the highly personal. His work mobilizes a repressed desire for beauty by creating a temporal imaginary in which allegorical structures speak for contested social spaces. 

Stage Set for a Riot (or, Whatever Happened to Mt. Vesuvius?) was a series inspired by the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which broke out after the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating an African-American civilian, Rodney King. The four works contain found minimalist objects subsumed into an expressive matrix. Throngs of black parallel lines imply physical structures seen in two-point perspective.

More recently, Jauregui's There Goes the Neighborhood series was produced in response to the historical character of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. Now a hip and gentrified area, Silver Lake was once a haven for the city's gay male population with a high concentration of bathhouses.

Artist's Talk with Danny Jauregui

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 4:30 p.m. in Beam Classroom, VAC