Ana Serrano: a sense of place

Ana Serrano – who has just released nine new sure-to-be-snapped-up works into the world at Bermudez Projects – likes to walk through neighborhoods, taking note of what makes each of them special – whether it be air conditioners, front yards full of family life, or lush gardens springing out of cement pavement. She collects impressions and with cardboard, glue and colorful acrylics, recreates the universe that contains her world: the homes, the cars, the neighborhoods, the gardens, the people.

“I wanted to be able to capture a little bit of the spirit of an unplanned city,” she says. Her pieces – from full-scale installations, to shockingly accurate models – sit on a point of impingement between what we see and what we pass through without seeing. Evoking a surreal realism, her creations are about houses as homes and the essence of being or having a place in the world.

They embody this essence in the world of the Southland barrio with its scattered, melded communities. With its 2-bedroom houses that usually contain a large and growing family, the small stores, restaurants, beauty salons and businesses with their hand-painted signage and neon-bright exterior colors.

Born in South East LA, of a Mexican immigrant family, Serrano moved to Downey – hometown of Weird Al Yankovic – when she was nine. She recalls as a little girl that although she was proficient in English, she was assigned to a special classroom for Latinos (she notes that Downey is now majority Latinx); she was impressed by the difference between the barrio and the look of the fresh white-majority village, a booming pioneer in the very concept of tract-home suburbia, with its crisp, middle class developments contrasting sharply with the randomly distributed individualistic vernacular neighborhoods of her early childhood.

Very soon, she hopes to revisit the Downey aesthetic and portray the evolution of some of its original Aerospace-era tract housing into the modern Latinx McMansions of the newly affluent.

Her current vernacular buildings sport characteristic details like potted outdoor exotic plants; white-painted window bars and house trim, along with traditional American colonial touches, like front-door fanlights. They are so convincing you want to knock on the white painted steel front security door and introduce yourself. The little houses, each a bit more than a square foot in size, are as much a tribute to the national ideal of family domesticity as is any 8-bedroom 3-acre mega house in Holmby Hills. Her work sometimes surpasses itself with an orgy of detail of an entire small neighborhood – as with her 2008 Cartonlandia, a crag-like rainbow of cut-paper sculpture outcrop stacked and encrusted with tiny homes, cars and garages, resembling in some ways Bruegel’s Tower of Babel … or for Southland locals, City Terrace. Salon of Beauty (2011) recalled a life-size (10 foot high) barrio street front, complete with a hair salon, check cashing service and a pedicurist.

“I like imagining who might live here,” she says. Her South Los Angeles homes in her latest exhibit at Bermudez Projects, called “a sense of place” – including those named after streets, like 41st and San Carlos – have some of her deepest of pastel colors, purple and pea green. They are so appealing you want to hug them.

And, for the first time, she’s created replicas of vehicles – her recent output includes ‘85 Jeep Cherokee (in deep maroon) and ’78 GMC Sierra (blue and white; complete with a camper shell). Both are modeled on the family cars of her childhood, which shuttled her between these worlds.

Serrano’s cityscapes and artifacts feel instantly familiar to Angelenos. They imitate the abounding domiciliary backdrop of our daily freeway travel, which we tend to ignore in our focus on the crowded pavement that leads us home. Her representations are faithful descriptions of what we really ought to be seeing everywhere ourselves.