The Falls

Ivan Ríos-Fetchko

On view September 23 through November 6 (Extended). Special hours 11am - 2pm on Sunday, November 6.

Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce The Falls, the first solo exhibition for Los Angeles-based artist, Ivan Ríos-Fetchko. The exhibition opens on September 23, 2022, and will be on view through October 29, 2022 (Extended to November 6).

Ivan Ríos-Fetchko’s work meditates on the American landscape and how it acts as a lens through which to look at histories, both national and personal. Painting from found tourist slides, Ríos-Fetchko overlays his own encounters with the American landscape over others’ images, making paintings dense with history. The Falls was conceived when he began to see visitors to Yosemite National Park taking nearly the same slides of Yosemite and Bridalveil falls – personal archives spanning 50 years and dozens of photographers still ended up producing nearly identical images. Confronted with this seemingly endless repetition, Ríos-Fetchko began to paint from the source material he had amassed.

Constructing each image out of tight, rapid, marks, the painting surfaces mimic the repetitive nature of the image-making, as well as the networked relations of the present – atomised gestures overlap but fail to connect, producing an image while staying distinct from each other. The surfaces are worked all-over in layers that accumulate like the silver gelatin layers that build up color within the 35mm slides, or like washes in a watercolor. Somewhere between film grain and pixels, the marks reflect a decades-long chain of seeing – through a roadtripper’s camera, their post-vacation slide projection, then through Ríos-Fetchko’s studio, and finally to a new viewer.

Roadside Companions, a looped projection in the side room, presents those photographers as they would like to be seen. 40 slides of the roadtrippers themselves, always beaming with pride alongside their vehicles, close the circle and return the viewer to the progenitors of The Falls. An easy nostalgia is impossible, as we see the lumbering vehicles that defined American culture for so many decades and are conscious of the damage they cause(d), invisible emissions through tailpipes of which we are now keenly aware.

The paintings, wrapped in steel frames, allude to those same vehicles that allow Americans access to so-called ‘public land,’ as well as reminders of the industrialized nation that dominates and decimates its land, ultimately driving people towards seemingly unperturbed slivers of nature. Within their rusted enclosures (a surface rust that has been sealed in, frozen in its progression, threatening structural damage but impotent to do so) the shimmering falls are also frozen in their movement. Their flow at once permanent and utterly static, a million snapshots projected to a million viewers, echoing across the still mountain stones.

Ivan Ríos-Fetchko (b.1994, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He attended the Brown/Risd Dual-Degree program, earning a BFA in Painting and a BA in Comparative Literature. His work has recently been shown at De Boer Gallery, with SPY Projects, at The Lodge, and at Tilton Gallery.