Imperfect Pearls
by Graham Feyl
Roughly at the same time over the 2024–25 season, two exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) — Accretion: Works by Latin American Women and Friends and Lovers — explore the nuanced and potent ways that the self is an aggregate of relationships, histories, affects and experiences.
Referring to the process of gradual growth through the accumulation of layers, the “accretion”process is often exemplified by pearls. These precious gems form when an irritant enters a mollusk and a substance called nacre, known as Mother of Pearl, is used to coat said irritant. Layers of nacre eventually form what becomes a pearl.
However, while smooth-rounded pearls have become desired for adornment, both exhibitions are wholly self-aware that ideas such as self-exploration and community formation are not smooth, but rather orbs with irregular surfaces, like the naturally formed — not perfectly round or spherical baroque pearl. Indeed, “Baroque” refers to the style and art of 17th and 18th century Europe, but the word comes from the Portuguese “barroco,” meaning “irregular pearl.” By embracing each experience as a unique formation of their own pearl’s surface, each show presents itself as if a baroque pearl — not shying away from the highly personal and intimate.
Accretion: Works by Latin American Women, September 29, 2024–April 13, 2025. Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Fourteen women artists who are working and living in the United States but have roots and ties to Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru are featured in Accretion, curated by Lauren Karazija, SBMA’s curatorial assistant to contemporary art. There is no hiding of the self in this show. A range of mediums dot the gallery, shifting from the physical to the ephemeral: earth, paint, photography, stories, memories coalesce to reveal how artists have navigated their own growth and transformation. Each work is like a dear friend as they slowly whisper and share their stories.
Accretion proposes that the personal is perpetually bound up by broader concepts such as immigration and labor. This is seen in works like the cardboard painting “Nightsweeper” (2023) by Jay Lynn Gomez, which references both the fleeting brushstrokes of Impressionists and the Latine sensibility or rasquachismo, the practice of making things from what is available. By asking the viewer to pause on the workers that make the everyday possible, the exhibition brings attention to what is usually relegated to the margins.
Jay Lynn Gomez, Nightsweeper, 2019. Acrylic on cardboard. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie JamesGallery, Los Angeles. Photo: 2022 Yubo Dong, ofstudio
“Ja,” the word for “home” in the Mayan language K’iche,’ frames Guatemalan artist Estefania Ajcip’s installation “Ja-K’iche” (2023), and helps underline the exhibition’s theme: how one’s self intertwines with the stories and ties that compose it. In the piece, inside a red wooden frame shaped like a house, a man sits at a sewing machine with a letter to his daughter spilling forward. Underneath the table, sits a child, a reference to Acjip’s personal history. As a child, her father worked and lived in Los Angeles to support her and her family in Guatemala. “Ja-K’iche’” evokes Ajcip and her father’s letters during that time, creating a connection with him despite his distance.
Just as the concept of home moves beyond its physical structures in Ajcip’s work, Deanna Barahona shows how diasporic cultures move and shift. An ode to her aunt Sonia who emigrated from Guatemala to the U.S. in the 1990s, the black and white photograph, in “Tia Sonia” (2023), a woman poses, looking at the camera, in front of a nondescript background. Colorful tiles surround the photograph, and Sonia’s name is presented in large orange letters. The work itself toggles between 1980s pop mall culture — colorful decorations, large swaths of tile flooring and portrait studios such as those at JCPenneys — to the aesthetics that Barahona saw in Guatemala on las camionetas, or chicken buses, retired U.S. school buses that are repurposed in bright colors and lights for public transportation. Between the promise of new and a responsibility to repurpose the old Barahona’s work asks, What does it mean to build ourselves anew from the materials already around and within us?
Estefania Ajcip, Ja – K’iche’, 2023.Fabric and acrylic on panel with basswood. Courtesy of Tlaloc Studios. Photo: Graham Feyl
Shaping one’s identity can rely heavily on the communities we find ourselves in. The exhibition Friends and Lovers, curated by Chief Curator & Curator of Contemporary Art James Glisson, navigates relationship building and formation in the LGBTQ+ community.While the large glossy images of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s studio and friends, the fracturing nature of Pui Tiffany Chow’s “Is It Inside, Is It Outside” (2020) and the colorful surface of Edie Fake’s painting “Suasion” each hold a presence in the gallery, several other works illustrate what queer family, friends and desires can look like particularly well. Queer, while capacious in its encompassing of identities, is used here to describe a way of being and loving that exists outside of normative standards and expectations.
For instance, in “Tres Generaciones” (2024), Los Angeles-based Oaxacan artist Narsiso Martinez paints a portrait of three men on a cardboard produce box with details in gold leaf: an act of biography and communal bonding. As a former fieldworker, these boxes hold potent memories of working with other migrants in California’s agricultural fields. Each wears a hat that evokes their personality: one has pearls that line the brim, the middle figure has a bicep curling, and the figure to the right has a cowboy hat with a fist as its emblem. They lean in together, and while their relationship is not disclosed, their closeness is felt.
Edie Fake, Suasion, 2024. Acrylic and gouache on wood panel. SBMA, Museum Purchase with Funds from the General Acquisition Fund
Acting as a self-portrait, Joey Terrill’s “Still-Life with Triumeq and Wrapped Candies that remind me of Félix Gonzáles-Torres” (2023) reaches into various facets of himself and invites us to the table to hear his life’s story. A bundle of grapes points to Terrill’s family’s connection to the grape boycotts in the early 1970s. Evocation of queer art history and AIDS activism emerges through the homage to queer artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who passed away from AIDS related-causes, and Triumeq, a drug used to treat HIV, pointing to Terrill’s activism.
A range of photographs from Santa Barbara-based photographer Nell Campbell capture the poignant history of queer activism. Images of drag queens in New Orleans, an ACT UP Protest, Dykes on Bikes at San Francisco Pride and a protest demanding the lifting of the military policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” bring a rich historical texture to the exhibition. While the other works in the show conceptually define new means of relationality, Campbell’s images show how queer relations form and shape historically.
Imperfect pearls, Accretion and Friends and Lovers present works that remind viewers that experiences and individuals are layered and complicated while considering how imperfection is a rich and sumptuous space to position oneself. What can be more queer than a pearl that refuses to be what is expected of it?
Cover image: Joey Terrill, Still-Life with Triumeq and Wrapped Candies that remind me of Félix Gonzáles-Torres, 2023. Acrylic, wrapped candies, wallpaper, wood strips and other mixed media. SBMA, Museum Purchasewith funds from Kandy Budgor; Luria/Budgor Family Foundation. Courtesy of the Artist and MarcSelwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles
