Beatriz Jaramillo

Self Help Graphics & Art

Getty Institute, Art and Science Collide, 2024

In Los Angeles, as elsewhere in the United States, communities of color are often the populations most vulnerable to the toxic effects of industrial waste and soil contamination. Sinks: Places We Call Home highlights the environmental disparities created by manufacturing sites in two communities located near Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG): Exide Battery plant in Vernon and the former Athens Tank Farm (Exxon/Mobil Oil Corporation) in Willowbrook.

Los Angeles-based artists Beatriz Jaramillo and Maru García conducted data-driven research revealing harmful practices of the past and present and their long-term devastating ramifications on communities of color and the environment. With new work for the exhibition, Jaramillo uplifts voices, stories, and data from the Willowbrook community to elevate how white supremacy has shaped urban planning policies and its long-term impact on the people and environment.

Sinks does not attempt to change the past but to elevate the voices and stories of the people who form these neighborhoods, despite the locations having served as sinks or reservoirs of pollution, and informs audiences about land contamination and alternative solutions. Jaramillo and García interrogate a history of government negligence, elevate stories, and explore tangible solutions that communities living in contaminated neighborhoods can access. Their artwork and practice aim to shift our relationship with the land and empower us to connect with the soil through knowledge, stewardship, and advocacy.

2015

Broken Landscapes is a series of sculptures addressing the progressive environmental transformation of the land. The sculptures are composed of solid but fragile porcelain slabs, supported by an unstable, slow moving, column of layered paraffin: a sign of the accumulation of events and the passing of time.

Beatriz Jaramillo

In-Between: Wetlands In l.A.

Artist In Residence, AIR, at Los Angeles Clean Tech-Incubator, LACI, 2019-20

A bridge between land and water, wetlands are among the most productive ecosystems in the world. their sponge-like ability to absorb and release water creates a natural filtration system, and protects against extremes weather events. However, in order to filter water and mitigate damaging climate events, wetlands require space to breathe.

Early photographs of Los Angeles evidence thousands of acres of wetlands, with kea areas stretching from mid-city to South LA, and the entire Marina Del Rey. Up to 95% of this natural habitat is now lost to urban development; with this, we lose the potential to capture blue carbon, house diverse ecosystems, and recharge underground aquifers. In In Between: Los Angeles Wetlands, Beatriz Jaramillo explores the contradiction between continual urban expansion and nurturing this vital natural resource. Through research at Ballona Wetlands, Jaramillo has created a series of works in engraved aluminum and porcelain juxtaposing the serenity of the wetlands with hard age representations of the urban infrastructure that contribute to their demise. With each wetlands area positioned within 5% of the frame , the work establishes a picture or just how much we have lost.

Debra Scacco, LACI, Program Director, Artist in Residence.

In between Palos Verdes and Catalina, scientists are investigating a massive contamination site. A deposit of toxic material of around 27,000 to 100,000 barrels of DDT. This chemical was sold as a pesticide starting in the 1940s, was banned during the 1970s because of its toxicity. How can we trace the dots? And, how can we start the process to clean it? The beauty of the seascape contrast with the consequences for the environment of such contamination.

2018

Porcelain and Black Clay

11” x 11”

With this work the artist explores the connection between global warming and the melting of ice on the polar caps. They are small format relief tiles of 11 x 11 inches, made out of porcelain and black clay. The color contrast helps to transmit the urgent message with intensity, and it expresses a relevant scientific fact. Porcelain: white, fragile and thin, is visually similar to ice which reflects the sun’s radiant heat. By contrast, the black water, as seen from above, absorbs it. In an exponential way, the larger the surface of water exposed is, the faster ice melts; increasing global warming.

2023

Deep in the Colombian Amazon, 

at the center of the earth, 

home of the Jaguar,

jet to be named vibrating bio-diversity,

Chiribiquete has been reverenced for over 12,000 years, 

and… 

it is threatened by global warming and deforestation!

Beatriz H Jaramillo

Broken Landscape 1, 2015

Porcelain and Paraffin

31 x 31 x 300 cm

Broken Landscapes is a series of sculptures addressing the progressive environmental transformation of the land. The sculptures are composed of solid but fragile porcelain slabs, supported by an unstable, slow moving, column of layered paraffin: a sign of the accumulation of events and the passing of time. The gaps between the pieces represent earth fractures, and man-made slices.  The organic reliefs of porcelain slabs represent mountain ranges and they reflect the influence that the natural world has had on me. In contrast, the geometric organization of the installations conveys the image of cityscapes and makes reference to its rational geometrical subdivision. In this piece, there is a marked emphasis on the environmental stress, expressed on the gap between the two elements of the sculpture. Although  they act as a unit, the gap between them creates a visual tension.

Beatriz H Jaramillo

Broken Landscape 2, 2015

Porcelain and Paraffin

65 x 125 x 130 cm. aprox.

This installation is a topographical relief composed of five pieces and organized in a geometrical configuration. The pronounced slop resemble mountains, and the different layers of paraffin talk about the passing of time, like sample cores that register the accumulation of events.  

Beatriz H Jaramillo

Broken Landscape 3, 2015

Porcelain and Paraffin

50 x 180 x 40 cm. approx.

This installation is composed by eighteen small reliefs raised four inches from the floor and positioned against the wall, except for the last one that comes forward to break the pattern. It is composed of porcelain plates supported by layered paraffin at different levels from the floor, on a geometrical formation, and resembling geologic sedimentation or stratification.

2014

Porcelain and Paraffin

This installation is a topographical relief composed of six sections and organized in a geometrical configuration. The pieces are supported in paraffin at different levels from the floor. And, its internal gaps and shapes create visual arrows and tension.

2014

Porcelain and Paraffin

This installation is composed of nine porcelain plates supported in paraffin creating a river bed like landscape. Here, the organic relieves are in contrast with the geometrical configuration of this topographical relief.  

2013/14

Porcelain and Oxides

Due to a long and irregular war in Colombia, farmers and even entire communities has been forced out of their productive lands and into the big cities. There, they find discrimination, intolerance and the vacuum of their social and cultural context. Out of their lands their means of subsistence is uprooted; there is an interruption on food production and a continuous struggle for survival due to the lack of resources. With Broken Plates the artist reflects about the internal turmoil after abandoning/dis-place the land; those empty spaces in between the mind, the emotions and the physical reality.

Metal and clay

2006

Paisajes Desplazados

Metal and Clay

1990-91

Galleria de Arte Diners, Bogota - Colombia