Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales: Echoes

Exhibition Dates:
August 23 - October 18, 2025

Opening Reception:
Saturday, August 23, 2025, 5-8 pm

839 is pleased to announce Echoes by Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together cyanotypes, sculptural vessels, and a multimedia installation that reflects Wallace-Gonzales’s ongoing interest in transformation, ancestry, and the interplay between human and natural forms. Across these works, she examines the material and symbolic residues that mark personal and collective change. 

The color blue recurs throughout the exhibition: as matte ultramarine in ceramic surfaces, as with Chrysalis Vessel Three (2024), and within the distinct solar-exposed hue of the artist’s cyanotypes, such as A Conversation With The Butterflies in My Mother’s Garden (2022). Wallace-Gonzales foregrounds the physical properties of nature: sunlight, pigment, the human body, alongside foraged plants and butterflies, demonstrating how they can be used to imprint, stain, or fossilize memory. Her cyanotypes place her in dialogue with a long tradition of photographic experimentation with botanical material, from the 19th-century studies of Anna Atkins to more recent artists like James Welling. Her work also offers a rejoinder to violent histories embedded in the color blue in Western art: from Yves Klein’s anthropometries to the colonial economies that traded in the scarce and coveted ultramarine pigment. In Wallace-Gonzales’s hands, blue becomes a site of memory and rootedness.

Influenced by Saidiya Hartman’s practice of “critical fabulation,” a method which blends research with storytelling to address the silences left by the legacy of slavery, Wallace-Gonzales draws on her own diasporic heritage to build a visual archive that resists linear narrative. Her resin-cast sculpture suspends fragments between emergence and dissolution. Her translucent paper sculptures, like Primordial Residues (2025), challenge perspective and dimensionality. She often centers the chrysalis as a symbol of bodily metamorphosis and spiritual continuity. Her figurative approach shares affinities with Wangechi Mutu and David Hammons in its integration of the body, found material, and layered historical references. With a focus on mythology and the natural world, Wallace-Gonzales engages the poetics of visibility.

20% of all sales from the exhibition will benefit the Immigrant Defense Fund via the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). In light of recent ICE-led kidnappings targeting working-class immigrant communities across Southern California, this contribution affirms a shared commitment to community protection, mutual aid, and immigrant justice.

Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales (b. 1992, Santa Barbara, California) is a Black and Mexican multidisciplinary artist using a variety of materials including ceramics, collage, resin, cyanotypes, wearables, installation, and sound. Her work draws parallels between the body and nature through the use of flora and fauna alongside the human form, while simultaneously engaging with body language, distortion, archetype, myth, and metaphor. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College in New York. She was an artist-in-residence at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard in 2018. She has exhibited at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Carnegie Art Museum (Oxnard, CA), Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) (San Jose, CA), Beta Epochs (Los Angeles), Atkinson Gallery at SBCC (Santa Barbara); and The Basic Premise Gallery, The Historical Ojai Jail, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation (all Ojai, CA), and more. She has served on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara since 2023.

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839 N. Cherokee Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Open Saturdays, 12-6 pm and by appointment

Accessibility and Parking: For the opening reception, we recommend public transit or parking in front of Bancroft Middle School on Las Palmas Ave., a short walk from the gallery. Please note that the gallery has a porch with four steps. A cat lives on the premises; guests with allergies may wish to plan accordingly.