I looked up at the sky as the wind whispered around me,
my thoughts reaching into the vast unknown.
From the highest vault of the universe,
a monstrous dragonfly’s head gleams,
reflecting shifting echoes of time.
It strikes at the hand of the unbound maker,
in the endless void.
It drinks blood pooled in a quiet chamber,
the blood seeping through stone and memory.
Now, release it—
To the unravelling creator,
To the chasm where light fades.

_{Brinton, D. G. (1882). The Maya Chronicles. D. G. Brinton.
Roys, R. L. (1965). The Ritual of the Bacabs. University of Oklahoma Press.
Recinos, A. (1954). Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya. University of Oklahoma Press.}

Avenue 50 Studio
3714 N. Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90065

Saturday, June 7 – Saturday, July 5, 2025
Featuring artworks by Mark Chavez and Ina Conradi – Media Art Nexus

Journeying across memory, myth, and cultural narratives, The Serpent and the Dragonfly brings together artworks that interweave ancestral wisdom with contemporary imagination. Informed by Chicano art, Southeast Asian textile traditions, postcolonial thought, and quantum metaphysics, the exhibition reflects on transformation, resilience, and belonging.

At its core, the dragonfly symbolizes actionable change—realized through the recognition of reality as a self-created illusion—while the serpent evokes ancestral knowledge and spiritual reflection.
This exhibition continues a legacy of content-driven art by embracing the liminal: where Indigenous knowledge systems encounter fractured urban realities, and ancient symbology converges with hyper-modern circuitry.

Marking their return to Los Angeles after two decades in Asia, Ina Conradi and Mark Chavez offer a renewed exploration of how emerging technologies can serve as instruments of memory, resistance, and reimagination.

Curatorial Statement – WordArt

Decolonial & Post-Industrial Collage Aesthetics with Surrealist & Dadaist Roots
In an era where the vestiges of colonial visuality persist through industrial detritus and digital fragmentation, Decolonial & Post-Industrial Collage Aesthetics emerges as a methodological intervention—a rupture in the hegemonic linearity of time, history, and authorship. This aesthetic mode operates at the nexus of decolonial resistance, the materiality of industrial decline, and the anarchic absurdity of Dada and Surrealist traditions. It interrogates the palimpsestic nature of post-industrial landscapes, excavating the ruins of imperialist modernity and reassembling them through an anti-hierarchical, radically hybridized visual grammar. Rooted in Dadaist détournement and Surrealist automatism, this practice rejects traditional Western compositional strategies in favor of the non-linear, the fragmented, and the subversively recontextualized. By appropriating and reconfiguring discarded colonial imagery, neon-lit commercial wreckage, ephemeral digital glitches, and obsolete technologies, these works resist the aesthetic homogeneity imposed by capitalist realism. The act of reassembly from the wreckage of empire becomes an aesthetic praxis that unsettles dominant narratives, reclaiming space for alternative histories, lost epistemologies, and speculative futures. The post-industrial aspect of this aesthetic is not incidental; it is integral to the material condition of contemporary visual culture. As urban centers undergo cycles of capitalist extraction and abandonment, their detritus—billboards, shattered glass, obsolete technology—becomes an archive of dispossessed realities. By integrating these elements into a collaged surrealist framework, artists transform industrial refuse into a site of memory and resistance. The absurd juxtaposition of the sacred and the synthetic, the ancient and the mass-produced, exposes the unstable foundations of Western modernity and its aesthetic logic. This aesthetic also engages deeply with the materiality of media itself, rejecting the polished ideals of seamless digital production in favor of raw, fragmented, and layered aesthetics. In embracing imperfections, disruptions, and unexpected outcomes, these works challenge the relentless drive for hyper-efficiency and flawless resolution. Instead, they foreground the generative potential of error and the beauty of unpredictability as integral aspects of artistic production. By disrupting traditional visual narratives, these works reveal new ways of seeing and thinking about the intersection of technology, culture, and identity. Within the decolonial framework, this mode of collage operates as a visual counter-inscription, dismantling the spectacle of colonial nostalgia that permeates contemporary cultural production. Instead of reaffirming the sanitized past, these works embrace the rupture—fragments of Mesoamerican glyphs glitching into hyper-modern circuitry, Indigenous cosmologies overlaid on broken urban infrastructure, spectral traces of erased histories reanimated through radical reassembly. This aesthetic intervention reveals the liminal space where temporalities collapse, forging an anti-colonial surrealism that refuses assimilation into the dominant order. Drawing from the anti-rationalist provocations of Dada, this aesthetic approach is neither purely destructive nor purely restorative—it is a strategic embrace of entropy and absurdity as tools of liberation. It revels in the rupture, the glitch, the incomplete and unstable, rejecting the notion that histories can be neatly reconstructed. Instead, it insists on the right to disorder, to non-linearity, to an existence beyond the consumable, commodified image. As Hito Steyerl asserts in In Defense of the Poor Image, the degraded, the ephemeral, and the fragmented hold within them the potential for new forms of solidarity and insurgent visibility. Ultimately, Decolonial & Post-Industrial Collage Aesthetics proposes a methodology of visual disruption, a space where the refuse of empire is reconstituted into an architecture of resistance. By collapsing categories, distorting hierarchies, and celebrating the incoherent, this aesthetic refuses the imposed clarity of colonial order. Instead, it revels in the spectral, the layered, the unstable—a radical vision of past, present, and future colliding into an insurgent visual field.

————————————————————

Curatorial Process: Transcripción de texto The creation of Transcripción de texto unfolded through a structured, iterative process that combined continuous refinement, critical reflection, and thematic synthesis. Originating from foundational concepts in decolonial theory, post-industrial aesthetics, and the traditions of surrealist and Dadaist art, the text evolved across multiple drafts—each iteration expanding, clarifying, and sharpening its theoretical intent. Early versions introduced key themes: a critique of colonial visual legacies, the reappropriation of industrial detritus, and the application of anti-hierarchical visual grammar inspired by early avant-garde movements. With each revision, the statement deepened its engagement with decolonial discourse and post-industrial conditions, incorporating increasingly precise language around ideas such as “palimpsestic landscapes” and “radically hybridized aesthetics.” The process also drew on critical theory, including Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image, to ground the work in a broader intellectual framework. Particular care was taken to balance academic rigor with expressive clarity, resulting in a text that is both accessible and conceptually robust. Throughout, iterative feedback loops guided subtle shifts in phrasing and emphasis, aligning the final version with the exhibition’s overarching curatorial vision. The resulting wordArt statement is a synthesis of conceptual depth, formal experimentation, and methodological hybridity—embodying the intersection of decolonial critique, surrealist strategies, and post-industrial poetics.

Avenue 50 Studio on Fig: A New Chapter

By Kathy Gallegos, Founder and Director

Avenue 50 Studio was born in 2000 out of a simple need for creative space. What started as my personal photography studio quickly transformed into a gathering place for artists and community members hungry for representation, dialogue, and change. Over the years, we became more than a gallery—we became a cultural sanctuary rooted in Latinx identity, artistic resistance, and collective memory.

For 25 years, our space in Highland Park hosted hundreds of exhibitions, poetry readings, tenant rights meetings, and grassroots events. It became a vital part of the cultural ecosystem of Northeast Los Angeles—amplifying voices that mainstream institutions often overlooked. As gentrification closed in, we fought hard to stay, until the inevitable came in 2024 with a final notice to vacate.

But this is not the end of our story. It’s the beginning of a new one.

We are proud to open our doors once again—this time at 3714 N. Figueroa Street, at the border of Highland Park and Cypress Park. Our new home, Avenue 50 Studio on Fig, is more intimate, but it carries the same soul, the same commitment to art as a tool for transformation and truth-telling.

Our inaugural exhibition in this space, The Serpent & The Dragonfly, marks a significant moment in the evolution of Avenue 50. It is our first show centered on digital media, artificial intelligence, and immersive installation. The exhibition features the work of Mark Chavez and Ina Conradi, longtime collaborators whose practice blends cultural archetypes with experimental interpretations of existence. Based between Singapore and Los Angeles, Mark (of Amerindian descent) and Ina (of Slavic heritage) are presenting their first solo exhibition in L.A. after two decades of living and working in Southeast Asia. Their large-scale, AI-inflected artworks—recently shown on monumental media facades across China—bring them back to their roots with this deeply personal and poetic debut in their hometown.

Within a decolonial framework, The Serpent & The Dragonfly acts as a visual counter-inscription—disrupting the spectacle of colonial nostalgia that persists in contemporary culture. Through glitch aesthetics, digital collages, and reassembled cosmologies, the artists confront erased histories and propose new, radical imaginaries.

This show continues our legacy of content-driven art by embracing the liminal—where Indigenous knowledge systems intersect with fractured urban realities, where ancient symbology merges with hyper-modern circuitry. In doing so, The Serpent & The Dragonfly reflects the transformation of our physical space, and signals our expanded vision: to explore how emerging technologies can serve as instruments of memory, resistance, and re-imagination.

Avenue 50 Studio on Fig will remain a space where art educates, agitates, and connects. This new chapter is smaller in size, but deeper in intention. We invite you to grow with us.— Kathy Gallegos, Founder and Director, Avenue 50 Studio on Fig