Linda Vallejo - Select Works, 1969 - 2024

“I have worked to discover woman in her modern and ancient place as a source of strength, love, and integrity. I believe that all women are a part of the earth and can be inspired by a relationship with and through nature. It is my firm belief that woman is the symbol of the earth and that each woman can learn aspects of loyalty, integrity, honor, generosity, and courage directly from the earth."

-Linda Vallejo (Artist statement, 1986)

parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Linda Vallejo: Select Works, 1969 - 2024, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the Los Angeles-based artist (b. Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, CA, 1951). Vallejo’s imagery is drawn from her beliefs about the cosmos, creation, and the interlacing relationship between women and the earth. Her work is a celebration of the innate relationship of nature with humanity and the divine forces which give life and death to earth’s creatures. Exploring relationships to nature and the spiritual legacy of her Mexican heritage, Vallejo’s practice is an amalgamation of aesthetics reflecting cultural memory, knowledge, and her own life experiences of Latino, Chicano, and American Indigenous culture and communities resulting in a Chicana feminist decolonial practice. 

This exhibition focuses on four bodies of Vallejo’s work spanning the artist’s five-decade career during which she has investigated a wide range of media and methods, from print, to sculpture, painting, performance, and installation. 

Throughout the 1970s, Vallejo’s experimental sculpture reflected her relationship with indigenous influences, ceremony, and the beginning of eco-feminism. She began using prints and leftover paper from her MFA work to sculpt three-dimensional forms invoking the Mesoamerican pyramids she had studied while adding other organic elements and materials to create microcosms of balance and harmony. 

In 1977, Vallejo joined Flores de Azltán, a danzante group, which became the catalyst for fusing her life experiences and spiritual journey together in creative practices. During this time, Vallejo immersed herself in the study and practice of indigenous ceremonies, participating in Maya and Aztec ritual dances and examining the remaining physical traces of Mesoamerican places of worship. The work on paper Mi Cultura (1977) represents a metamorphosis for the artist in becoming one with the earth. Vallejo pulls specific Aztec symbols of corn and the sun learned from her travels through Mexico, directly connecting the work to her Chicana heritage. Here, the physical body serves as a connection between the past and the future; a conduit for the spiritual energy which flows between past lives and future births, forever connected to the earth and the spirits watching over it.  

Vallejo’s Tree People series (1980-1990) further connected identity and spirit to nature. She formed this series of sculpture-based work around the question: “How would humanity appear if we acknowledged our fundamental relationship to nature?” In answer, Vallejo collected tree fragments around Los Angeles, rescuing them and imbuing them with new life. For Vallejo, her art is “living”, alive with a cultural tradition which directly connects with the community to uplift and facilitate connections to the past and the future. With pulped paper and other media, Vallejo looks again to indigenous ceremonies where the tree is central -- the life force, as in El Pacal (1990), where an amorphous figure emerges from the wood or from nature itself and appears to smile up at the sky. Vallejo exhibited the Tree People series at Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles during this time, where she often worked with Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis as an avid member of the Brockman community. 

Throughout the 1990s, Vallejo continued to experiment with subconscious impulses, the intimate connection and spiritual power women have with the earth as well as the relationship between the earth, the sky, and the spirit. Reflecting on the ways in which land holds history, memory, and knowledge, the paintings in the artist’s Los Cielos series (1995-2008) induce a sense of belonging in the cosmos as the female figure is woven into the landscapes that comprise this series. With each layer of paint Vallejo pushes her viewers to encounter the sublime, to contemplate their own immortality, humility, and connections in the universe. In Solitary Cloud I (2007), there is a spiritual presence amongst the blooming purple cloud, but it’s soft, only a whisper. 

If Vallejo’s Los Cielos series was the artist’s way of connecting back to nature in a time of an encroaching digital landscape, in her current series, Self-Knowing in the New Age (2023-ongoing), she has pivoted to use pixel abstraction to create psychological portraits that explore humanity's relationship with technology and machines. This series was preceded by The Brown Dot Project, an abstracted body of works on paper often in the shape of mandalas, based on her Make ‘Em All Mexican brown-painted porcelain figurines. Both bodies of work illustrate data on Latino life in the United States by turning statistics into visual representation. In Reflection on Immortality (2024), Vallejo seems to suggest that technology offers a false sense of immortality in the digital world, as it only reflects the values of the immediate users, and that a the only true sense of immortality is held within nature and the minds, values and traditions of our ancestors and the collective energy of future generations.