B. LYNWOOD, CA, 1991; LIVES IN LOS ANGELES
Felix Quintana’s photographic work establishes the street as a site for artistic intervention. His extended series of cyanotype photographs titled “Los Angeles Blueprints” (2019–present) derives from Google Maps Street View shots of his South Central neighborhood and suggests surveillance of the migrant community. But Quintana makes the eerie bluish images more intimate by selecting digital images that accidentally capture hand-painted signs and random pedestrians going about everyday activities. He has also scratched onto the surfaces of some of the pictures various vernacular words, drawings, and other markings.
“I created scratched handmade cyanotype prints to reflect waves of gentrification, collective memory, place and home — revealing what is beneath the surface,” Quintana notes. “Through a hybrid multidisciplinary process, my work reimagines surveillance archives of Black, brown, immigrant, working-class people – those who are often left marginalized throughout history.” Quintana has also incorporated these cyanotype photographs into a series of large-scale mixed-medium collages titled “Para Los Lil Homies” (2019–present). After a flood in his studio had reduced many of his works to small scraps, he reworked these elements into collages in an effort to rebuild. This work challenges the complex mythology of South Central Los Angeles by focusing on working-class Angelenos and by reclaiming community-based narratives and representations.
This installation is part of the exhibition Parallel Lives: Photography, Identity, and Belonging, curated by Maya Benton. Parallel Lives draws attention to complex notions of community and belonging, and in particular how our social and familial relationships have been reimagined as a result of the conditions of isolation and uncertainty imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Photo: Felix Quintana, Untitled, 2022