Fantasma Paraiso / Phantom Paradise

Have you ever seen someone you love reduced to a blurry apparition on Google Street View? Felix Quintana has. The multidisciplinary artist and educator recognized the spectral form of his father one day, photographed while crossing the street in southeast Los Angeles. This recognition caused him to consider the humanness absent in the popular Google feature, used for getting a feel for an area without actually being there. What sort of “feel” was there really, given the sterileness of the technology?

With fantasma paraiso, Felix layers beauty, day-to-day routines and emblems of Los Angeles’ diasporic communities into such imagery through the cyanotype process. The focus holds personal significance for Felix, who, as a first-generation Salvadoran American, uses the project as a means of chronicling the critical and disappearing histories of the city’s immigrant communities and businesses. 

Presented in collaboration with public art nonprofit Los Angeles Nomadic Division, fantasma paraiso is ongoing and ever-evolving. We’re honored to have hosted Felix at Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles this January as part of our Artist in Residence program, to continue his work up and down our dear Broadway, memorializing a strip we’ll miss forever. 

---

Broader than Broadway

On Broadway they do wheelies

with no front wheel

Off Cliftons, stealing tha sunshine

I hop on the 16 in early daylight

Where palm tree’s off of 5th Street

slip and glide

Layers of dust and sprayed tags

Time wanders slow around here

Where they slang doggie dog bags

And Tacos for $1.25

Views from the 11th floor at dusk

Synchronized flashes

pop off and disappear

Across the way, A pool

filled with water that mimicked

the ocean

A Salvadoran flag cut into

an LA logo

Broader than Broadway

the light gleams in slow mo’

A poster repeated promo

The homies not working pro-bono

Sinaloa Jewelers covered by

A draped and tattered banner

I woke up to a street parade

And witness the sun shine move

Like wire spokes

In strips from east to west

---

fantasma paraiso / phantom paradise is a multisite exhibition by artist Felix Quintana commissioned and presented by public art nonprofit Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). From February – March 2024, Quintana’s mixed-media works will form an ephemeral portrait of Los Angeles by placing his signature portrait and landscape photography directly in the locations that they represent. His billboards, wheatpaste posters, vinyl banners, and signs uplift the beauty of the day-to-day routines and the emblems of diasporic communities of Los Angeles. Quintana encourages a slowing-down and flattening of the past and present through his unique cyanotype style of combining photography, print-making, collage and mixed-media.

fantasma paraiso, inspired by and named after a mixtape left behind by Quintana’s late father, will populate the city with familiar details like awnings, store windows, teenagers on bikes, donut trails in an empty parking lot, as well as images pulled from Quintana’s own family archives. Understanding that his own subjective perspective is just part of a larger chronicle, Felix has held public portrait sessions, and invited public contributions of personal images and archives to create these images. Quintana also embraces source material and inspiration from Google Street View, Swap Meets, and handmade signage.

Quintana chose to focus on collaborating with locations that are deeply personal, and also point to the disappearing histories of the city’s immigrant families and businesses in Southeast, Central, and East Los Angeles. The result is a witnessing of Quintana’s communities, and their simultaneous enduring stories of migration, and continuance. The first two installations will take place at Plaza Mexico in Lynwood and the headquarters of art education nonprofit Art Division in Westlake, with more to be unveiled this winter.

• #AIR
• #Uncategorized