Descendants and Dissonance
Alumnus Oscar Magallanes had been a practicing artist for 10 years before earning his Bachelor's degree from the UCLA Department of Art. Throughout his decade of working, Magallanes said he knew that in order to make it as a serious, professional artist, he needed to complete his degree, something that was not part of his reality as a teenager in Azusa. His education at UCLA’s Department of Art transformed how he viewed himself as an artist as he became confident in a variety of mediums and as his work developed a broader range: “I had to break the work down and unpack what it was that I was doing and understand why I was creating what I was creating within this larger context of art rather than just being a successful artist within my community,” he says. “I was now existing in a much larger art world, getting feedback from people like Lari Pittman, or Barbara Kruger, or Phil Chang, which was amazing.”
"Descendants and Dissonance: Cultural Iconography in contemporary L.A. brings together the work of three graphically inspirited artists, Oscar Magallanes, Linda Vallejo and Sonia Romero, Los Angeles based and deeply tied to Chicano culture and the tradition of challenging propagandist iconography through the use of irony and appropriation. This exhibition seeks to correlate directly with How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney and The Making of the Modern: Indigenismo, 1800-2015 at the San Diego Museum of Art in the idea of creating identity and the use of iconography as political and cultural tools.
Oscar Magallanes, creates across a spectrum of different interlocking mediums. Laser cut wood, video and stenciling create a hyper-detailed narrative that speaks directly to the history of propagandist iconography sourcing its power from the emotional experiences of the people who have most suffered from corporate imperialism. Through an alchemic combination of imagery, the work aims to be a visual documentation of suppression and creation, life and death."— Salt Fine Art, Official Press Release, Oct. 1, 2017
Read the full article at the Salt Fine Art website.
See a day in the life of Oscar Magallanes here.