Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio and Clarissa Tossin (Commonwealth and Council, Stand IN5)

Presenting at Frieze London 2022 as part of Indra's Net, curated by Sandhini Poddar



Los Angeles-based artists Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio and Clarissa Tossin come together in conversation at Frieze London for the first time. Though belonging to different generations, both artists are concerned with the imprints of human interventions on our built environments and the destruction of nature.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s materially rich sculptures and tapestries are mnemonic containers of lived histories, experiences and trauma. Culled from sources as varied as his cultural roots in El Salvador — and that community’s long-standing presence in LA — to street culture, graffiti and urbanism, they appear as vivid palimpsests. The artist is drawn to haptic materials such as rubber laminae casts of tree barks, amber, tree sap, glass shards and clothes. Together, these disparate surfaces point to his family’s varied and diasporic lineage, as well as to forms of craft and labour within Central American communities. Aparicio asserts that “the clearest way to follow the traces and branches of colonialism and historical oppression is first to claim total material non-neutrality.”

An investigation into the post-Anthropocene Epoch is central to artist Clarissa Tossin’s discursive practice. Working across assemblage, textiles and sculptural installation, her work “considers how frontier mythologies pave the way, charting the seemingly relentless progression: discovery > development > extraction.” A series of pendant sculptures and wall reliefs are woven out of strips of broken-down Amazon boxes. Tossin combines this ubiquitous material with abstracted images of the moon, Mars, or distant star clusters; space is indeed our newest colonial fetish. A series of castings of Tossin’s face in clay and a dead Sycamore Maple tree in silicone speak to slower cycles of decay and regeneration, or else possible extinction.

About Indra's Net

Derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu thought forms, Indra’s Net refers to an ethics of being, where an individual atom holds within it the structure of reality. Imagine a vast bejewelled net: at every nexus there is

a reflective orb that mirrors and refracts every other orb in its entirety. Each part is held within the whole in a system of dependent origination. All sentient life is interconnected; shifts to one atom subtly alter the rest.

Curated by Sandhini Poddar, this group presentation brings together leading international artists whose practices are informed by this prescient metaphor. In various media, we learn of ancestry, history, language, consciousness and futurity as being bound to the earth, which serves as a perennial witness through the arc of time. 

Find Out More about Indra's Net