A conversation with Ryan Preciado in conversation with rafa esparza

Text by rafa esparza
Photography by Carlos Jaramillo

Apartamento Magazine - Ryan Preciado in conversation <p> with rafa esparza

Los Angeles: Time passes slowly, stills, in Ryan Preciado’s home and studio in central LA. Chairs form loose circles around conversations that must have stretched into the night, left at slight angles where distant ideas gather again in morning light. Ryan’s designs experiment with function, ranging from domestic pieces to more ‘insecure sculptures’, elemental shapes painted with primary colours. These works are united in their concern for a human element, an awareness of how the leather of his Chumash Chair might embrace a body, how the feel of soft oak conjures memories of his grandmother’s home. That warmth likely extends from Ryan’s creative process, which leans into collaboration: in the local hardware store and auto shop where he exchanges ideas, in the friendships that have become a place of inspiration.

‘With rafa, I felt something shift almost immediately’, Ryan said. He met rafa esparza, a multidisciplinary artist and fixture in LA’s art scene, in the early stages of Downhearted Duckling, a show Ryan curated at South Willard to tend to his Mexican and Chumash heritage, reckoning with the exclusionary nature of formal galleries. rafa inverted Ryan’s invitation to join the show, contributing a portrait of Ryan in his Chumash Chair, his gaze steady amidst the texture and earth of the adobe on which it was painted.

There are stakes to these bonds, which transcend a vague or sterile idea of ‘community’. In the face of sustained protests against immigration policies and targeted raids, thousands of federal agents were deployed in LA in June in what the New York Times calls ‘a rare use of active-duty military forces on U.S. soil’. Backdropped by rows of armoured vehicles, LA residents formed rapid response networks to support those affected by the increased raids; restaurants opened their doors to offer protestors refuge from the heat and a place to rest; and neighbour marched hand in hand with neighbour.

A question of inheritance trails this conversation, where home is both the place where you are and a memory you inherit, no matter how distant the past. It lingers in the motor oil smell of Ryan’s recollections of his grandfather, in his grandmother’s holy whispers. ‘It all just makes sense when I start to listen’, he tells rafa. ‘Everything’s right there, and that’s exciting to me’.

—Apartamento

Wait, did you get a haircut?

I did, man.

Damn. Looks sick. I need to get one too.

I always get bored with haircuts and end up doing something I regret. I’ve been trying to let my hair grow out for a long time, and then I cut it and was like, why did I do that?

Yeah, that’s how I am right now. I got a real gross little, not a rat tail, but a platypus ducktail, a whole thing in the back. I might just let it go.

I’m glad that you’re getting an opportunity to divulge a little bit about your work here. Walk me through: Is it an idea that comes first? Is it an image? How do you come up with a concept?

I take it where I can get it. I mean, a lot of it can be image-based. I can be driving and see something and take a photo and then expand from that. It can be a conversation that you and I have. Lately, it’s referencing architecture that I’ve been really interested in. There’s no specific way.
The Handle totem came from a conversation I had with the owner of my local hardware store, a little mom-and-pop shop where I’d go once a week and exchange music, usually boleros, and we’d talk about it in my very broken Spanish. While he worked with customers, I would walk around picking up things that looked sculptural. After a while, he started to do it too, for fun. Then that became the topic we spoke in Spanish about. He told me how much he loved his shop and how proud he was to have it all. That he wished people could see things the way he and I were looking at these objects he sees on a daily basis. He held up a water wrench and said, ‘This is more sacred than a prayer. It provides for the people using it, puts food on their family’s table’. It really blew my mind. The totem is a portrait of our conversation.

So your work is very much inspired by your lived experience.

Yeah, totally. That’s really all I got.

How does that shape the way in which you physically start to make a piece?

That is also determined by the spaces I get to work in. Right now, I have a wood shop that’s shared. My auto shop, I’m basically borrowing time from the family that owns it. As far as making each piece, I’m constantly near someone, and everyone that I’m around, they have no motive for being an artist. They’re there to do a job, and they happen to know a trade that is useful. So when I’m doing what I’m doing, it really gets me in a strange headspace because they’ll ask questions: ‘Why this? Why are you using pink here? What is this shape?’ Sometimes I don’t have answers, and sometimes I do. I come here, and an idea is deconstructed by multiple brains and hands. It’s just a full collection of memories from the beginning to the end. It’s a complete story.

We’re touching a little bit on process, and I’m wondering how you think about labour as it relates to your creative practice?

Where I grew up, it was easier to get into manual labour. I was a commercial painter for a little while, a cabinet maker, I was a bad welder at one point. Whatever was available. I was learning and doing at the same time. I’m doing what I’m doing now because of all this.
I do love this idea of a trade. I remember changing the oil with my grandpa a long time ago. He had a little Ford Ranger. I was under there, the motor still kind of warm, and it smelled really good. My grandpa was a quiet guy, but really machismo, like, snakeskin belt tucked into his shirt, 10 rings on, purple tinted aviators that he wore at night. I think he promised me $10 if I helped him, and he ended up giving me two bucks. I felt like he was telling me, ‘You can do things yourself. You don’t need someone else to do it for you’. I just remember being hands-on. I think specifically when I started working for a furniture maker, I started to look at things a little differently because I was more interested in the unfinished thing than the fully finished thing.

Do you feel like those spaces, those processes, have informed what you do in your art?

At the auto body shop where I get my work painted, these guys, they’re really sweet. When a car is really fucked up, looking like a John Chamberlain because of some shitty experience someone just had—these guys are resurrecting these cars. It’s purely utilitarian, but what they do is so inherently beautiful. I guess they could not give a shit about art, but when I bring pieces in and we’re painting them, it’s the exact same process they use to fix cars. Lots of Bondo and sanding, and they all have such strong opinions. It’s the most valuable information for me.

There’s also an attention to materials in your work. Could you speak to that?

I really take pride in preserving the integrity of a material, whether it’s fabric or wood or how I’m treating a finished product. I liked using domestic woods. I picked up some lumber from my grandma’s backyard, from friends in my hometown, that’s been curing. I can bring in something from my home, stuff that I grew up around all the time. There’s some sort of blanket feel, something comfortable, especially having grown up around so many oak trees. Some of that material, I haven’t even used yet. It’s just waiting to let me know what it wants to be.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a painter, but this is what I imagine it feels like to paint or play jazz. Don’t get me wrong, there are times where I’m like, it’s going to be this no matter what, but every time I have an exact idea of what a piece is going to be—it talks as you’re moving it, it’ll tell you what it’s going to be, and you got to let it do that. I want to let the material speak for itself; if it’s really beautiful on its own, maybe some oil and wax, but I want you to know it’s oak. I want you to be able to see it.
The first totem I made was out of this lumber alder left over from a sofa. All these leftover bones of the sofa I made, I just glued it all together because I didn’t want to waste it. I wanted to use the sofa bones to actually make a nonfunctional sculpture.

I’m interested in the phrases you use to describe your work, like ‘nonfunctional’ or ‘insecure’ sculptures. Can you speak more to those ideas?

When I say ‘insecure sculpture’, that’s genuinely what it is. This is still new for me. Carpentry and making furniture, that’s how I started, but as I’m getting more and more confident, I’m starting to be OK with removing a tabletop, maybe, or just having a piece be something. That’s where some of these furniture-ish pieces come in. It’s visible evidence, in real time, of me becoming a more confident person. But I still like the furniture aspect of it all because it’s disarming, people can relate to it. Obviously, everyone has had a chair or a cabinet in their house, so they feel more comfortable looking at that than they do looking at something that’s maybe not so easy to digest, like a painting.

Some of your sculptures are anthropomorphic, or they embody human traits, and I like the idea that they could be insecure. I’m curious if that informs how they’re made. Does an insecure sculpture have a heavy layer? Is it powder-coated? Does it have a certain finish?

A lot of them are exactly my height, so it’s real personal sometimes. With something like the Pope Cabinet, I’ll spray it with a beautiful colour. I’ll peacock it out. It’s like we’re putting on nice clothes. It’s really showing off a little bit. I love that; I love the finish, I love paint, and I love colour. Car culture is huge in Los Angeles. I genuinely love hot rods and lowriders, so growing up, I was always attracted to colour. Then as I got more interested in art, I started seeing people like Alton Kelley, and my mind just got fucked. I was like, this is sick! Or Frank Stella or these guys, where I was like, holy shit. I also love Memphis Design, and that shit is just covered in colours. It all just makes sense when I start to listen, when I really let myself listen. Everything’s right there, and that’s exciting to me.

Peacocking in these art spaces. You’re starting to lead into this question about your relationship to white cube or traditional art spaces.

I guess it changes. Originally, when I made my first cabinet or insecure sculpture, it was the Pope Cabinet. I paired it with a little pedestal—just raw white oak, no oil—that my grandma gave me from her museum that she had in Guadalupe of all Chumash Native American artefacts. This pedestal is the most important thing in the room, but you can’t keep your eyes off of the Pope Cabinet. It’s so beautiful, so shiny. You kind of just walk past the pedestal and ignore what you should really pay attention to. Sometimes I’ll use these pairings as a little magnet. It’s like, I’m asking you to pay attention to this thing a little bit more.
I also grew up with this religious imagery in my house but never talked about it; it was just looming and haunting. I also only talked about being Chumash Native with my grandma growing up. So it was this weird collision of my grandma’s whispers—the pedestal—with this overwhelming presence in the room, this Catholicism—the cabinet.

I love this way of thinking about objects and their relationship to one another. Maybe this is because I’ve experienced coming into spaces and feeling like I don’t belong there, but I love thinking about objects that could kind of inhabit a similar space of being a little shy, a little ambivalent.

Oh, they’re super shy.

But they’ve got their best button-up on, for sure. It’s also interesting, knowing that two pieces come from the same place, the same person. You make both objects, the insecure and the more traditional pieces.

It’s all the same materials. They’re made in the same way, even. That’s the funny thing: If I were to close my eyes and make these things, it’s the same motions. One thing I want to say about the Pope Cabinet, the reason why it was a two-tone green is I’m really into this architect named Adolf Loos. I was reading his book, Ornament and Crime, and he is a great, great architect, but kind of a piece of shit. He talked about Native Americans as ‘savages’ in this book. He made this beautiful bar in Vienna called the Loos American Bar. He used these two-tone greens that I use, and I paired that with the Pope Cabinet, thinking about this architect whose use of colours interested me even as I felt conflicted about loving this person’s work while kind of hating who they were.

Being in conversation with something that someone put out into the world and using that space to show the dichotomy, the contradictions that we exist in. Thank you for sharing that about the cabinet. Is there anything else you wanna share about how you’ve experienced your work coming into contemporary art spaces?

It’s new, but it’s also no different from how you and I have grown up. It’s just on a heightened level because there’s eyes now, but it’s nothing that I haven’t felt before going back to having an insecurity or feeling unwelcome or tokenised. It’s a strange feeling because people are interested and curious, but we still have to talk about who we are, our heritage, in order to talk about process. I guess I’m very confused because on one hand, I’m happy to be here, but on the other hand, I sometimes question why I am allowed here, if that makes any sense.

I have this experience at almost every venue that I work in: It never fails that install crew comes up, and they’re like, ‘It was such a pleasure to work with you. We don’t get many artists that come in and really get their hands dirty with us’. I have to be very hands-on when I install. So I’m always there with the work.

Presence is enough sometimes. I recently had my first experience installing my work in a museum, and it was a strange thing because I wasn’t allowed to touch anything.

How did you deal with that?

I showed up every day, and when they were installing, I touched things. I moved things. But then when they really got upset with me—I got reprimanded—I’d just talk to the people. I would just be like, ‘How’s everyone doing?’ and hang out. It felt so strange, that’s for sure.

Have you come across people in the art world who gatekeep?

No. Well, at least with the homies we have, there’s no gatekeeping at all, which is sick. And even in South Willow, my Los Angeles art experience has been nothing but love, and it’s been nice. But as I go into these other worlds, you just hear the same hot words getting thrown out a lot. I don’t know. I am new to museum and gallery spaces right now, so I guess maybe that’s a question for me to answer in six, seven years, once I have some more time under my belt. But right now, truthfully, the people I’m working with all seem very sincere and mean well, and that’s all I can ask at this point.

That’s great. I feel like, amongst us all, we’ve cultivated a really supportive network of friends and people that geek out on weird ideas. People have been working towards making this work, this world, more habitable. You’re also transmuting these feelings into a mode of making work that is welcoming, where people feel like they belong. It’s really cool. We’re really lucky that we get to do this thing together while we’re all getting to share some Earth time.

When I first met you, you were such a pivotal person in making me feel confident enough to even be OK with having these ideas. Not only having these ideas but moving forward and realising or actualising these ideas. Still to this day, I’m really thankful. I know we’re pals, but I’m always still nerding out from afar as number one family. I love that we’re friends. It’s so nice.

Ryan Preciado in conversation with rafa esparza

Phoebe Collings-James

Jiro Hsu & Michael Janczewski

Alex Turnbull

Ryan Preciado in conversation
with rafa esparza

Jiro Hsu &
Michael Janczewski