Servicios Express by Jazzy Romero

      Exhibition dates: June 25—July 30, 2022

LaPau Gallery and Coaxial is pleased to announce Servicios Express by multidisciplinary artist and musician Jazmin Romero. Servicios Express is an exhibition in which Romero explores how her mother’s story of migration, labor, informal markets, and the food service industry intersects with and illuminates her own. Presented in both gallery rooms, Romero uses film, ceramic sculpture, and performance to engage with questions of origin that often reflect on the complexity of labor and migration and draw attention to how the body becomes a weighted vessel carrying these experiences from locale to locale. 

"Olga's Kitchen" is a film directed and scored by Romero. It was filmed over the span of three years (2019-22) and documents her mother's life. The film traces her mother's migration from Michoacán, Mexico, to CDMX, and finally to Los Angeles, California. Through a series of oral histories that often feel like testimonials, Romero learns of the grievances that caused her grandmother and mother to depart Michoacán for CDMX. These intimate confessional moments amongst three generations of women highlight patterns of displacement and dispossession while asserting the resilience, joy and complexity of migrant families who leave behind Mexico's rich countryside for industrialized cities shaped by economic disparities. 

“Oficina de Gritos” is a series of ceramic works that respond to the fragmentation of the self and the realities of living in working-class communities. In this body of work, Romero carefully engages the earthly materiality of ceramics. She employs the medium’s malleability and absorbent qualities to point to how this earthly material registers every gesture and element to which it is exposed. Rather than viewing ceramics as static and fixed markers of memory after exiting the kiln, Romero’s incorporation of text recounting worker experiences recalls the public and private spaces where these surfaces become sites for new mark-making infused with new memories. Similarly, she draws on the rich tradition of ceramic murals that adorn public spaces reminding us that ceramics like storytelling “come together to make a new memory; they go places, burn, and then transform.” -Jazzy Romero