Perpetual Flowering, 2019
At Vincent Price Art Museum
In their first solo museum exhibition, Edgar Fabián Frías transforms the gallery into a multi-disciplinary offering/sanctuary/portal, mixing video testimonials, digital imagery, flower essences, and interactive elements to create an environment that encourages contemplation as well as altered states of awareness. Perpetual Flowering foregrounds the importance of self – care, creating community, and ways in which we may hold space for each other. Collectively, Fabián Frías’s works create an environment conducive to empathy and understanding, and one that reflects an intersection of various sectors the artist engages with including art practice, community organizing, therapy, ceremony, healing practices, and spirituality rooted in the sacred knowledge of their indigenous heritage. Their installation encourages the dissolution of boundaries between these areas, weaving together personal and collective narratives.
A descendant of the Wixarika, Fabián Frías organizes the installation utilizing colors associated with the sacred directions, and also re-interprets ancient ceremonial songs into contemporary music videos. Perpetual Flowering also includes a series of video testimonials that bear witness to the experiences of selected participants living in the Los Angeles area and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, offering opportunities for the viewer to connect to stories that may resonate across communities. Highly stylized digital imagery, incorporating sacred and natural elements, is presented in diverse forms evoking a home environment, such as printed shower curtains and pillows. The artist also includes sacred objects, as well as a unique flower essence charged with natural elements that are native to East Los Angeles created in collaboration with artist and herbalist Saewon Oh. Additionally, Fabián Frías collaborated with Oh on a zine that is also on view, and the two will lead a flower essence making ceremony, open to the public, to take place during the run of the exhibition.
KauyumariTatewari, 2019
What Is Something You Wish You Would've Heard Growing Up?, 2019
What Is Something You Wish You Would've Known Growing Up?, 2019
Untitled (Anonymous), 2019
Video Testimonials made in collaboration with:
Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas
Photos below are photos from the Flower Essence Community Workshop which took place on July 20, 2019 at the Vincent Price Art Museum.
All photos by Monica Orozco
Subsequent Iterations
Portions of this exhibition, including the main video from this exhibition, KauyumariTatewari, were included in the group exhibition Unsettling Time, which took place digitally and in person at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN as a part of The Wrong. Curated by Alejandro T Acierto. Documentation also provided by Acierto.
An iteration of Perpetual Flowering was included in the group exhibition Techno-Intimacy. Techno-Intimacy showcases the work of artists Lena Chen, Myra Lilith Day, deSolidState, Edgar Fabián Frías, Michael Neumann, and Tabitha Nikolai. Through the use of digital and internet platforms, these artists attempt to carve out new pathways for knowledge-production, aesthetics, cognition, spirit, and viewership. Techno-Intimacy invites the visitor to consider a porous boundary between the digital and physical--or "Away from the Keyboard" (AFK)--realms. By dissolving these barriers, the artists suggest a new form of connection: a connection both at corporeal and communal level, where limitlessness is possible. Curated by Jessica Borusky, UNF Gallery Director and Instructor.
Iteration of Perpetual Flowering which was a part of Vaz A Ver/ You Will See: The 25th annual National Queer Arts Festival which took place from June 9 - July, 2, 2022 at SOMArts in San Francisco, California, and was curated by Xtal Azul and inés ixierda. Presented by the Queer Cultural Center.