Tyler Park Presents When The Home Becomes Body, a new collection of photographic and video works by artist and filmmaker Pau S. Pescador. Pescador's artwork explores her relationship to the world beyond her inner psyche, often told through playful interactions and interventions. When the home becomes body is centered around the domestic sphere and her relationship to the concept of home throughout her gender transition. The exhibition is broken into three collections of work: two bodies of photographs When the home becomes body and Home is where the c*nt is, as well a single-channel video If I can’t go home again, then call me by my name b*tch!

When the home becomes body was created over a period spanning a few months leading up to the artist moving out of the first place she lived in alone. The photographs are a collection of studio-based materials that accessorize and layer different parts of her apartment, almost like totems or assemblages gathered over time. These images were taken in daylight then projected on the walls of the same rooms at night. Empty bookshelves and boxed-up rooms become the stage for projected images with Pescador standing in each frame—a continual body in an ever changing home. Influenced by work of Francesa Woodman and Gregory Crewdson, the abstraction between the figure, space, and projections invoke a nostalgia of one’s daily respite.

The second collection of photography, Home is where the c*nt is, was created in the artist's bed. The photographs were produced with the flash of a cell phone camera as Pescador photographs her nude body beside a range of everyday objects: small wooden toys, jewelry, and children’s masks. The images are sexually charged with the dangling of red lip earrings near a nipple or a skull figurine placed to enact oral sex. Skin, fat, and curves are highlighted as sculptural and occasionally architectural forms. The photographs enter a lineage of images within the artist's work where her body becomes subject through simple minimal gestures corresponding to her environment. Diverging from Pescador’s past work, which focused upon the exploration of public space, Home is where the c*nt is, is more internal as she attempts to understand and play through stereotypes of being a sexualized trans feminine body.

The final component to the exhibition If I can’t go home again, then call me by my name b*tch! is a single-channel video shot within a wood dollhouse inside the artist's home. Filmed entirely at night with projected images and flashlights, the camera pans from miniature room to room. Composed of simple vignettes, videos of personal footage, and video from the artist's performance practice. Similar to the rest of the exhibition, there is a ghostly element to the images of the light moving through each of the dark interiors. The soft pink of the dollhouse evokes the overabundance of hyperfemininity from Greta Gerwig’s Hollywood blockbuster Barbie and how this color has radiated the summer of its release while, simultaneously, an unprecedented amount of anti-transgender legislation is being passed throughout the US.

In all three bodies of work the viewer watches the artist play with toy-like objects alongside her body as she questions her own physical, emotional and legislative safety outside her front door. What is the role of home in times of such adversity? Is domestic a space of refuge from the outside world or has home become a self-enclosed prison where the artist is merely left alone within her own isolation?

Pau S. Pescador (she/they) is a contemporary trans fem nonbinary artist who works in film, photography, and performance that lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with an MFA from University of California, Irvine and a BA from University of Southern California. Select exhibitions and screenings include: 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica; 5 Car Garage, Santa Monica; Advocate and Gochi Gallery, Los Angeles LGBT Center; Anthony Greaney; Boston, Ashes/Ashes, Los Angeles; Biquini Wax, Mexico City, Cal State Dominguez Hills Art Gallery, Carson; Campbell Hall Gallery, Los Angeles; Coastal/Borders, Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at Angels Gate Cultural Center; Deslave, Tijuana; LADRÓNgalería, Mexico City; LAND at The Gamble House, Pasadena; gallery1993, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Klefied Museum, Cal State Long Beach, Long Beach; Lenzer Family Art Gallery, Pitzer College, Claremont; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Main Museum, Los Angeles; Park View, Los Angeles; The Pit, Glendale; Marathon Screenings, Los Angeles; Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery; Scripps College, Claremont; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; UV Estudios, Buenos Aires; Vacancy, Los Angeles; and X-TRA Online. Select performances include: Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; ForYourArt, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange; Los Angeles Contemporary Archives; JOAN, Los Angeles; Machine Projects, Los Angeles; PAM, Los Angeles; Performa 2015; Colony, New York; Highways, Santa Monica; LAXART, Los Angeles; Situations, New York; UC Berkeley: Durham Studio Theater; REDCAT, Los Angeles and Salon Silicon, Mexico City. Her first collection of writing, CRUSHES: A NOVELLA, was published by Econo Textual Objects in Spring 2017.