Diana Yesenia Alvarado at Jeffrey Deitch

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Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Earth Wish I (2023) Glazed ceramic, 64 × 40 × 42 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

There’s a photograph on Diana Yesenia Alvarado’s Instagram that shows her standing on a stool to reach inside a large, cream-colored ceramic vessel.¹ It looks like she’s mid-dive—her upper body could be easily engulfed by the unfinished ceramic, it’s that large. This significant sense of scale came through in Alvarado’s exhibition EARTH WISH, drawing viewers into the universes of the artist’s sculptures, which alternately resemble ancient artifacts dug up from the earth, weathered trinkets, and objects from outer space. Alvarado’s work evoked a palpable tension between our nostalgic connections to our planet and the possibilities of other worlds.

Much of Alvarado’s inspiration comes from her childhood in South and East Los Angeles, during which she absorbed cartoons and treasured the handmade objects her father brought from trips to Mexico.² The ceramic figures at Jeffrey Deitch had large, expressive eyes and sprightly postures that bring to mind Looney Tunes characters like Tweety Bird. Alvarado draws on most of her characters’ faces with underglaze pencils or airbrush, and her loose and whimsical style recalls hand-painted signs at barber shops, party supply stores, and ice cream trucks around Los Angeles (she often posts photographs of these signs on Instagram).³ The Sharpie drawings of cartoon animals on the surface of BLU HUE EARTH WASH (2023), a wide vessel, nod to childlike wonder and locate the sculpture in our urban, pop-culture-infused moment. At the same time, the sculpture’s blue, black, and beige tones make it seem like a handmade vessel from an earlier era, rooting us on Earth but suggesting a flexible line between past and present.

Earth Wish I (2023) is a five-foot-tall cylindrical sculpture akin to an oversized vase. Beige rabbits and cats with dark brown and orange ears and red cheeks wind around the large vessel, their bodies skipping and dancing across the surface. That their claws protrude from the surface makes them less like decorative elements and more like sentient beings. With its limited color palette and sense of motion, Earth Wish I looks primordial. Yet the illustrative nature of the creatures’ faces betrays a contemporary hand. As with BLU HUE, its appearance does not align with our understanding of time, inspiring the question: Was this piece discovered on earth, as evidence of an earlier civilization? Or did it crash-land on our planet from somewhere up above?

Alvarado recently completed a residency at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, which was founded in the 1950s as a factory that produced dinnerware and décor and began offering artist residencies in the 1990s.⁴ The artist was inspired by functional ceramics while there, engaging with the tradition of the factory. When she brought the works back to Los Angeles and prepared to include them in this exhibition, she continued to glaze and draw on them. In this way, her different experiences of two very real locations—Los Angeles and Guadalajara—came together in these ceramics, which seem to originate from a world influenced by, but more porous than, the one we inhabit. SPACESTONE (2023), which suggests a galactic origin in its name alone, features a vessel-like bottom half that morphs into an unruly, oozing mass of unfamiliar green, black, and brown protrusions. These details imbue the piece with a sense of otherworldliness, or magical properties, the likes of which we don’t understand just yet.

By using animals that feel like they came out of a children’s book or a bedtime song, Alvarado combines nostalgia with nods to the mythical and otherworldly. CONEJO ESPACIAL (2023), whose title roughly translates to “space rabbit,” shows a creature with pointy ears that resembles something from a science fiction comic. Standing confidently on its hind legs, the creature has a silver sheen that recalls astronaut and alien outfits as imagined in pop culture. Its eyes are guarded, and its mouth is drawn into a pout. In PERRISCORPIO (2023), a dog-like creature cranes its neck back, looking behind its shoulder. It wears a spiked collar and has a scorpion standing in for its tail, details that conjure another reality in which mythical creatures have adopted punk aesthetics.

These creatures are most successful in large-scale formats—PERRISCORPIO measures almost two feet on its longest side—especially when they show off thick nails and arching backs. They take up space and stare right back at the viewer, as if we are the one entering their worlds, not the other way around. While the exhibition also included a group of smaller works that recall the handcrafted trinkets of the artist’s childhood, it was through these larger creatures and vessels, informed as they are by the artist’s past and present relationships to Los Angeles and Mexico, that Alvarado most effectively constructed nostalgia-infused alternate realities. EARTH WISH ultimately imagined what other worlds might be out there while paying homage to what keeps us tethered here.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 36.

Eva Recinos is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her arts and culture journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Artsy, Art21, and more. Her creative non-fiction writing can be found in Electric Literature, PANK, Blood Orange Review, and more. She is currently working on a memoir in essays.

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