Poetic, internal, observational and mysterious—all describe Tristan Espinoza’s “Index, Interiors,” currently on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Both inscrutable and mesmerizing, Espinoza’s work uses the mediums of hand-made cyanotypes and AI, a fascinating combination of media that also includes augmented reality.

Surreal and delicate, perennial (2020), the work within “Index, Interiors,” takes the experience of surveillance and renders it into a lace-like latticework of diaphanous beauty. Paired with elliptical poetic phrases, the exhibition offers a site-specific web-based artwork, that serves as a personal and eternal history, one that shifts in patterns of white drifts like snow. The images move across and through a rich blue background, reminding the viewer of blueprints, only in this case they are blueprints to the soul.

There is a sense of both grace and unease in the images, which fits with how the artist describes them, as created while under self-imposed pandemic quarantine, seeing the world essentially through screens, viewing “place… as synthetic observation.” By identifying visuals as “a view of a mountain range in the water” and “a black and white photo of a giraffe,” Espinoza encourages the viewer to see each as linked, rather than disparate; connected as the body is to the earth, as the earth is to space, as the eye is to the camera.

Beyond that, the artist works to stimulate a conversation about what we as viewers are actually seeing. What are the relationships of one thing to another, one being, one observational tool? he asks. How are immediate images connected to memory? Along with an embedded, absorbing two-minute video, Espinoza’s cyanoptypes draw us to participate in these images, despite a physically closed gallery space.

The works are created from patterns of orange tree leaves, but by combining their intense and intimate detail with descriptive phrases, the artist indicates they represent something “other,” something that leads us to different or deeper layers of understanding along a journey through space and time. Espinoza references the way in which the citrus genus moved through the world until it came, via agricultural and labor-based migration, to California.

Just as the fruit trees themselves were dispersed here in 1493, and put down literal and metaphorical roots within California culture, so too did its growers, pickers and packers. The journey that the artist takes us on, through a wondrous and minute visual labyrinth that resembles many things beyond the empirical truth of the images, is richly representative of the journey of migrating humans, flora and fauna. We are all together in this world, the artist appears to say, a collective sum of its strange and closely observed parts, growing in experience.