Net
June 15 – July 15, 2021
Opening Park Reception
Saturday, June 19 from 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Hermon Park Tennis Courts
5566 Via Marisol, Los Angeles, CA 90042
bundled up, twisted—stomach-turning haunt.
being carried over the barren dunes of experiential temporality like an egg on a spoon. cycles of accumulation.
detritus made sacred.
the casually violent act of crumpling a shirt in your hands before throwing it in a laundry basket. trying to find connections in earnest—cloth analogues to various neuroses, armatures attempting to expel, to excise, to exorcise the crumpling, inside.
splintered through text. a warm little biscuit cleaved in two. two hemispheres of your brain—winning and losing.
meanness, myopia, wavering so-called trueness. unable to see things as they really are, because the bile tumbles hopelessly out of your mouth and asserts itself as a player on the scene.
stronger than you, entrenching itself into the fabric of your life, crawling into your heart and eyes, parts of your body that are vestigial and hidden—and staying there.
time to play little games.
if i knew how to play, i would win.
i do not know how to play, so i lose.
push and pull—tug of war.
the olive branch twists and splinters.
being crumpled up. being thrown. being washed.
being dyed. acts of malice or contrition?
maybe i wouldn’t like it. winning, i mean.
if i ever won i could renounce my victory,
and be stronger.
find other laurels to rest on,
safe in my redundancy.
I can visualize a swarm of sanctified trash, loose notes with scribbled allegories, jpgs on the brink of destruction, headstone epitaphs, and a pantheon of memes swirling around Jasminne Morataya: a calm magus directing an entropic cloud of chaotic matter. The web connecting these seemingly disparate elements is difficult to concretize, yet it is an incredibly real and pervasive force within Morataya’s practice. Through Net, Morataya’s first solo public exhibition, I hope Court Space can provide an environment for the artist to splay their nonlinear forms across the fences and architectural forms of Hermon Park.
From June 15 through July 15, Net will inhabit the alleys between the tennis courts at Hermon Park. As Court Space’s longest unauthorized installation, the work’s various fabric and textile components could potentially be stolen, mangled, destroyed, or taken down by the City of Los Angeles. However, as the custodian of the work I happily risk arrest, citation, or any other form of civic punishment. Even if our sanity is tenuous, our prolonged disobedience is important in defining citizenship. At times Morataya’s forms allude of the mental instability all too common in capitalistic nation states, and especially within the churning insanity of Los Angeles’ wealth disparity. Net, while radically liberating civic property, also transforms the liminal space between tennis courts into a place reminiscent of an arcade or colonnade — a fluid spider web disrupting the phallic rigidity, geometry, and solemnity of a crazed society.
– Ezequiel Olvera
