Andrés Janacua at 839

Andrés Janacua, My Dad Drips (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and 839. Photo: Kyle Tata.

In Andrés Janacua’s solo exhibition at 839 gallery, My Dad Drips, familiar textile patterns and furniture forms are imbued with menacing connotations. Housed in gallerists Liz Hirsch and Joshua Smith’s Hollywood home, 839 blurs the line between private space and exhibition site, setting the stage for works that navigate similar ambiguities. Crossing the threshold, viewers are greeted by Wound Licker (2024)—woven from black and white toquillo, a synthetic lanyard material sourced from Michoacán patio furniture makers, this paravent flickers like a static-ridden television, evoking the orderly geometry of weaving and the glitchy unpredictability of digital media. Through such works, Janacua invites us to consider how these collisions challenge the spaces we inhabit, where nothing is as stable as it seems.

Toquillo panels dominate the show, hanging throughout 839’s two rooms and corridor. Drawing on his training in Indigenous craft, these visually striking panels merge the handmade and industrial to explore how craft forms reference contemporary anxieties. Resembling broken digital screens, they render moments of technological failure dizzyingly tactile. In the towering black panel If you light a man a fire he stays warm for the night; if you light a man on fire he stays warm for the rest of his life (2023), light plays across the woven surface where a cascading diagonal pattern is interrupted by diamond motifs, generating a visually unstable “Magic Eye” effect. Moving through the intimate gallery space, works like Wound Licker or A Party Without Cake Is Really Just a Meeting (2024)—an angular cedar ostrich plunged headfirst into the floor—physically impede the viewer’s path, forcing them to navigate the space cautiously and confront the literal and symbolic collisions that define the exhibition.

Janacua’s titles offer a sly levity to many of these largely abstract works, inviting viewers to navigate the tension between humor and abjection. The show’s name, My Dad Drips, suggests both seeping bodily fluids and stylish fashions, while If you light a man on fire seems a horrific but irreverent inversion on the parable of teaching a man to fish. This playful yet unsettling use of language underscores the exhibition’s larger juxtapositions—handmade and order on one hand, glitchiness and unpredictability on the other. Through these collisions, Janacua’s works evoke a fragile balance between stability and chaos, reflecting a world where even the most familiar forms can be unsettled by hidden tensions.

Andrés Janacua: My Dad Drips runs from November 2–December 21, 2024 at 839 (839 N. Cherokee Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90038). 

Siwin Lo is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Canadian Art, and she holds an MA in Art History from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in Art History from the City University of New York.

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