Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Folded Memories, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Estefania Ajcip, her first with the gallery. Ajcip explores memory, connection, family, and the ways these intersect with and are affected by the immigrant experience. Ajcip’s wall-based, three-dimensional works invite viewers to step into her half-remembered, half-imagined worlds, in which she examines the physical and emotional landscapes of her own childhood split between Guatemala and Los Angeles. Often based on old family photos, the paintings unfold themselves into the space of the gallery, tracing the shapes of the yearning and dreaming that defined the artist’s upbringing.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the large work Back to One. A patterned sofa stretches across the composition, seamlessly transitioning from two to three dimensions as it reaches out beyond the right edge of the frame. This exaggerated sense of perspective is a hallmark of Ajcip’s work; she establishes perspective through painting and then emphasizes and playfully distorts it through sculptural elements that seem to organically emerge from the painting’s surface. Here, we are in the East LA family home where she spent some of her young childhood. A woman curls on her side, a self-portrait of the artist as an adult. Ajcip inserts her adult self into this childhood memory as a kind of corrective, her presence a physical manifestation of the desire to change the circumstances of the past.

Ajcip’s father, who worked in Los Angeles while the rest of her family remained in Guatemala, appears throughout the exhibition, his lingering presence mirroring the weight of his absence during her formative years. His silhouette fills the doorway in Back to One, looking on as his daughter contemplates a youth without him. His figure appears in the mirror of a wardrobe in To The Last Use, a cherished piece of furniture purchased with the money he sent home. And he waits on the other end of the telephone line, standing at an imagined LA payphone as part of a wistful childhood fantasy in I’ll Wait For You. Ajcip works through feelings of abandonment and loss from a place of reunification; after years spent apart, she and her father are once again close.

Ajcip’s unique process begins with small cardboard models, where she works out the architectural underpinnings of her paintings. These are then scaled up into surfaces built from carved foam and slim birch plywood, with papier-mache for the more organic three-dimensional shapes. The resulting armatures are light yet solid, the finished works sculptural yet unmistakably painterly. Many of the compositions include small LED lights, heightening their dreamlike sense of reality. With this body of work, Ajcip breaks the surface of painting, opening her compositions up to the surreal perspective of dreams and memories.

This perspectival play is most apparent in Four paths/Two paths?, in which a periwinkle city bus turns and trundles its way off the picture plane, into three-dimensional space. Serving as a symbol of the long journey of immigration, the bus carries portraits of both the artist and her father as it travels the route between Guatemala and Los Angeles. The travelers are led by a quetzal in flight, the national bird of Guatemala and a symbol of unity and hope – here, specifically, the familial unity that Ajcip so longed for throughout her childhood. Across the exhibition, Ajcip makes clear again and again how the longing that defined her youth now fuels her art, a powerful reminder that strength often grows in adversity.