Traces
Farshid Bazmandegan
Jackie Castillo
Amina Cruz
Rachel Hakimian Emenaker
Jackson Hunt
November 9 – November 23, 2024
Opening Reception: November 9, 2024; 5-8PM
Location: LA Artcore, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
LA Artcore is pleased to announce the opening of "Traces," a dynamic five-person group exhibition exploring the convergence of landscape, abstraction, and the concept of place. The exhibition opening reception is on Saturday November 9th from 5–8 PM.
Featuring works by LA artists Farshid Bazmandegan, Jackie Castillo, Amina Cruz, Rachel Hakimian Emenaker, and Jackson Hunt, the exhibition challenges traditional representations of the natural world by merging the boundaries between landscape and abstraction. Through diverse mediums—painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media—the artists explore how space is felt, remembered, and reimagined. Their interpretations range from personal archives and fragmented cityscapes to organic forms and abstract gestures that speak to both the tangible and the ephemeral.
"Traces" invites viewers to consider how landscapes are more than physical environments—they are spaces of memory, movement, and meaning. Each artist brings a unique perspective on how a place is constructed through time, layers, and perception, prompting questions about belonging, identity, and our evolving relationship to the land both natural and constructed.
Pictured Above:
Jackson Hunt, Untitled, 2024 - Acrylic and Collage on Canvas Wrapped Panel, 12” x 12”
Farshid Bazmandegan:
Farshid Bazmandegan’s work explores the intersection of space, memory, and the material world to examine the complexities of exile and displacement. Through his practice he looks at how Western ideologies and imperial interests have shaped the lives of many in the Middle East, including his own. By delving into personal, political, and historical narratives, Bazmandegan reflects on the idea of a body without a home in the landscape of exile.
Farshid Bazmandegan was born and raised in Iran. He is an Iranian-American artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Bazmandegan received his MFA from UCLA in 2024 and his BA from UC San Diego in 2017.
Jackie Castillo:
Rooted in film photography, sculpture, and installation, Jackie Castillo’s work is marked by an ongoing investigation into the relationship between city infrastructure, collective memory, and the isolation and anxiety felt by working class immigrants. Born in working class Orange County, California to parents who immigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, Castillo’s site-specific installations combine photographs of suburban landscapes with architectural remnants to explore the ways in which place, labor, memories, and identity can become fractured, estranged, or made invisible. Her photographic work and research have largely focused on the history of land development in Southern California and its vast, yet violent relationship with the cultural and material landscapes of this region.
Jackie Castillo studied at the School of Photography at Orange Coast College before transferring to the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture where she received her BA in Art in 2018. She is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.
Amina Cruz:
Amina Cruz's work stems from a deep interest in investigating the areas between transformation and identity, personal narratives and how we are shaped by the spaces we inhabit. She is an interdisciplinary artist that uses photography as her main form of exploration and she employs surrendering to materials and collaboration as tools to investigate visual representations and forms of identity.
She is interested in art that brings viewers into a deeper connection with the preciousness and difficulty of a changing self and in-between moments. Moments that ask questions of purpose and belonging.
Amina Cruz was born and lives in Los Angeles, CA. She hitchhiked around the country before deciding to move to New York City, where she earned her BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. She also holds a MFA from UCLA. Her interests are based in queer culture, early 1900’s photography techniques, and exploring the space between transformation and identity.
Rachel Hakimian Emenaker:
Rachel Hakimian Emenaker is an Armenian-American artist with an MFA in painting from UCLA (2024), currently living in Los Angeles. Raised between Paramaribo, Suriname, and Moscow, Russia, she grew up immersed in diverse and often conflicting narratives, aesthetics, and histories which influence her practice. Her work blends traditional Eastern and Western art and craft practices with themes of commodification, global trade, and migration. Through her installations, she reimagines architecture as symbolic spaces where histories collide, erasure and diasporic memory reshape identity and the landscape, and new languages are formed, offering a nuanced perspective on geopolitics, culture, and globalization.
Jackson Hunt:
Jackson Hunt is an artist working primarily in painting. Hunt’s abstract works utilize a personal archive of images to engage with slippage of memory and image construction as a material process. Combining collage, paint and mixed media, Hunt examines family histories, documentation and representation through an autoethnographic framework and proposes that a painting can contain history with or without legibility.
Jackson Hunt (b. 1988) is a descendant of the Klamath and Modoc Tribes and the Cherokee Nation. He was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and his work has been featured in New American Paintings. Hunt is a recipient of the 2024 In The Paint Artist Grant. He received his MFA from UC Irvine and is based in Los Angeles.