The Museum of Contemporary Art returns with its “Focus Series” featuring the first solo show of LA-based artist, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. “MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio” showcases some of Aparicio’s previous work of rubber castings and amber installations, while framing the larger narrative of Aparicio’s own life and body of work; a story that resonates with many other Salvadorans displaced by economic, colonial and punitive powers.

The show features several hanging tree castings taken of various trees throughout LA, as well as tapestries that combine rubber with fabric. Upon close examination, these rubber trees tell us a story of their lives, every cut, scratch and impalement a story. 601ft2 para el Lago Suchitlan / 601 sq. ft. for Lake Suchitlan (2023), one of Aparicio’s amber works, appears to slowly seep across the gallery floor, while trapped inside one can spot human bone, a shoe, a soccer ball, a Pizza Loca box, and even legal documents —ephemera which tells a disembodied story of someone unknown, like fossils trapped in time.

Upon entering “MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio,” the viewer is greeted by a mural of a cartoon chicken donned in green military gear and holding a green chicken drumstick. While this chicken may seem odd and out of place to foreign audiences, this chicken is held in great fondness within Central America and its diaspora. Started in Guatemala, “El Pollo Campero” is a famous restaurant chain in Central America that has become synonymous with the taste of home to many Central Americans. This depiction of the chicken serves as a not-so-subtle nod to El Salvador’s Civil War, in which El Salvador’s government murdered a number of leftist organizers, clergy members and civilians.

Born in 1990, only two years prior to the end of El Salvador’s Civil War, Aparicio takes it as his artistic responsibility to remind us that no matter how hard we may try to repress, rewrite, and revise the past, the future will remember.