The telluric temple at the center of trazos de energía entre trayectorias fugaces (strokes of energy between impermanent traces), an immersive installation debuting at Frieze LA and presented by Maestro Dobel Tequila and Art Production Fund, affects a primeval gravitational pull intended to draw viewers from around the fair’s Santa Monica Airport campus. Jackie Amézquita, the Guatemalan-born, Los Angeles-based artist behind the large-scale intervention, bears a similar magnetism. From the moment I step inside her light- filled Inglewood studio, I’m struck by the warmth of her demeanor, the candor of her conversation. For the first half of our meeting, I don’t so much as deposit my jacket or bag, unwilling to disrupt the vigor of her speaking.

“The temple, inspired by Templo del Gran Jaguar in Tikal, represents the center of a compass,” Amézquita says, conveying a ziggurat-shaped structure modeled in brown Lego bricks. “All four points of the earth come together, and no matter where you or your family or ancestors migrated from, they’re all connected here.” Depending on your cardinal orientation to Amézquita’s studio, her workspace can resemble a kitchen, a laboratory, or a masonry. To one side, a row of ovens and an industrial freezer; to the other, glass bubblers, bins of biomaterials, and copper panels enduring various degrees of corrosion; and across the back: stacks of earthen slabs that, from a distance, resemble bricks or sheets of attenuated stone. “I think of it as a body,” the artist says of her studio.“We’re the heart, my assistant and I, and the ovens, they’re the lungs. They keep us going.”

Like the pair of organs in our chests that transform air into oxygen-rich blood and carbon dioxide into waste gas, the ovens transform the soil-based substrate—a mainstay in the artist’s practice—into something she can work with: a surface for inscribing, a plate for eating, or a preliminary part from which to compose more complex sculptural forms, as is the case with her upcoming installation.

“There was a lot of trial and error in the beginning,” explains Amézquita, who started working with soil in 2017 during her final year at ArtCenter College of Design, where she completed her bachelor’s degree before pursuing her master’s at the University of California, Los Angeles. Years of experimentation have since yielded her exacting process, “The work is just as much about the process as it is about the final object,” Amézquita shares, who sees a corollary between the handling of organic materials and her relationship to the earth. “It’s about regeneration and the renewal of energy.”

Amézquita’s longstanding interest in earthwork is borne of her personal and familial experiences traversing it. Originally from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, the artist migrated to the United States at 17. After crossing the border, she lived undocumented for more than a decade before successfully becoming a “lawful” permanent resident. In 2018, she reimagined the immigrant journey as a performance piece titled Huellas que Germinan (Footprints That Sprout), where she walked in silence from Tijuana, Mexico, to LA over the span of eight days. As the title suggests, along with questions of transnational identity and the enduring trauma of displacement, her work explores the ways in which the land acts as an archive, a repository of human experiences, and supports an ecosystem that transcends geography connecting all living things across continents.

After gathering and preparing her dry ingredients—soil, limestone, salt, and masa—and collecting either rain or ocean water, she mixes it all together in simple handbuilt frames. Then, harnessing the elemental effects of fire and ice, water and air, she freezes the slabs before baking them for four to eight hours. Afterward, she places them outdoors to dry or, as she puts it, to “charge” in the sun. To study their loamy surfaces—each unique in its texture, fissures and perforations, and precise shades—is to see the process preserved in the form as the form itself. In the past, she’s gone on to use the slabs as dishware, subjecting the unfinished facades to the effects of organic foodstuff as with proclamación; gathering 1 to 4 or etched simplified scenes initially captured in film from various diasporic communities throughout the city as with her contribution to the 2023 Made in L.A. biennial, El suelo que nos alimenta.

For the Mayan temple, soon to be resurrected at the center of a soccer field dissected by winding ingenious rock pathways, Amézquita’s created four distinct recipes to represent the four different layers of the earth. The slabs used for the first two steps, corresponding with the inner core, feature lava rock sourced from Mammoth; the second two, the outer core, feature charcoal; the third level, the mantle, contains a reddish-orange clay, while the apex of the pyramid, representing the crust, features familiar brown topsoil gathered from around the city. Along with the different substrates, each slab contains ocean water and the artist’s special ingredient, masa.

Amézquita’s decision to incorporate masa was inspired by a childhood memory. Her grandmother, who fled persecution in Mexico and settled in Guatemala, used to make tortillas and tamales on a comal for her family. The artist, who recalled sitting at her grandmother’s feet, playing with the bits of masa that fell and mixed with the adobe floor, felt, in repeating the action, a profound connection to her familial history and ancestral land. The past, long since lost to the erasure of displacement, was suddenly accessible, if not indivisible, from the present.

“What’s amazing is that my mother has come to help me here in the studio, and though she doesn’t have any real memory of doing this, [Amézquita’s mother left Guatemala for the United States to procure funds for her son’s medical care when the artist was only two] says it feels familiar as if she’s done it before in a dream,” she explains. It’s also true that the ancestral significance transcends the personal: Amézquita discovered in her research that according to the Mayan creation myth, humans were formed from corn. “Everything’s interconnected—this knowledge endures and cycles through generations.”

It’s this sense of deep time and historical precedent that the artist hopes to introduce to the ongoing discourse surrounding immigration. “People have been moving around the globe for thousands of years, and it’s not just humans or even all the animals that migrate every year,” she says. “The earth—the physical earth—moves too and has been moving.”

By recontextualizing the subject outside of the highly politicized North-South dynamic and removing the human drama altogether, Amézquita hopes the debate can be approached differently. Indeed, when I consider a bird or a bear unable to cross an arbitrary wall, the entire conception of borderlines becomes absurd, delusional even. Introducing concepts like continental drift, and highlighting the myriad fault lines that run beneath the artificially bifurcated surface, exposes the fragility of the conceit.

When Amézquita lifts a soil slab from the top of one of the myriad stacks, I notice that the bottom is painted with copper, which she explains has various healing properties. “Copper is naturally occurring in both the soil and our bodies,” she says. “It’s another connector between human beings and the ‘natural’ world and a reminder that to heal one is to heal the other.” 

Examples of Amézquita’s extensive work with copper are hung along the walls, including panels from a project that involved arranging produce in such a way that as it decomposed, it corroded the metal surface, leaving mottled oceanic bruises in its wake. Between the various displays of fruit covered over by plastic containers, she’d also arranged straws that allowed flies, born from the rot, to travel from one environment to another. When I asked how she knew they’d make the connection, she says she didn’t: “Sometimes all you can do is create the bridge and hope that they’ll cross.”

Of the lava field, I have no doubt that to heed the magnetic pull is to arrive at revelation—a renewed sense of terrestrial connection—on the other side.

Photographed by Jonathan Hedrick

Written by Tara Anne Dalbow

Hair and Makeup: Tatiyana Elias at Celestine Agency