LETICIA MALDONADO | Autonoetic
July 10 through August 28, 2021
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 10, 6-9 pm
Why does Leticia Maldonado work in neon?
Maybe it’s because of the pizzazz of Vegas, where Maldonado grew up. “My mom was a cocktail waitress whose shift finished at 3am. Even on school nights, my stepdad would wake me up and we’d go get her. We’d drive right down the Strip in the middle of the night, and I’d look at the beautiful signs for The Dunes, The Tropicana, The Flamingo, and The Stardust. It was a giant, glamorous, electric fantasy land.”
But Maldonado’s works aren’t garish signs; they’re organic shapes — a rose, a moon, the female form — and finely wrought. Maybe that’s because she also spent a lot of her childhood with her grandmother in Fresno, learning to share her love of gardening, watching life “exploding out of the ground.”
Memory, flora, and pizzazz combine in Maldonado’s new exhibit at Bermudez Projects, “Autonoetic.” The dictionary says autonoetic is our ability to place ourselves and our thoughts in the past or the future. Maldonado says, “I think a better description would be sentimental objects that represent ways to track and keep time.”
Think of a rose pressed between the pages of a book.
For this exhibit, Maldonado has transformed this concept into a collection of 7 neon and neon-based works, each holding a unique story or memory.
A set of three “flower bouquets” refer to significant places in Maldonado’s life: Sullivan’s Island, NC; Paradise, NV; and LA’s Highland Park neighborhood.
The three “Starlings,” a non-connected triptych, poignantly speak to stages of existence. They also refer to the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. Each “Starling” serves as a repository for energy, saved to be engaged in future perspectives — a precipice, an archway, and a gate.
Maldonado’s self-portrait, “Just a Moment, Let Me Get My Things” offers us an opportunity to get closer to the artist through symbolic objects touching on unique facets of her life — a neon trumpet, an ace card, and more.
Maldonado says, “In my artwork I try to process the different layers of the human condition as woven through all of the different layers of personal worlds, by finding the threads of emotion and beauty that unite us and inspire compassion and empathy. My visual language for this expression is guided by the violent elegance and honesty of nature.”
Maldonado’s art studies began in figurative drawing, but she was pulled inexorably toward the glimmer and glister of neon. First, she learned the basics of creating patterns and design from neon art pioneer Lili Lakich; then the crucial skill of glass bending with neon master Michael Flechtner.
Her first serious complete neon work was a horror-comic inspired logo (she was originally interested in illustrating comics) for a local punk rock band called “The Misfits.” Since then, the work of her life has been to encourage a connection with herself, she says, through use of imagination and “creative destruction.”
Some of that destruction is inevitable, because, to achieve as much detail as possible, Maldonado chooses to work with the smallest diameter glass she can get. Her glass-bending colleague and friend Meryl Pataky says that her highly demanding work with 5mm diameter tubing is so precise that it’s “kinda crazy.” Neon tubing is usually 8-15mm in diameter. Patacky also notes that Maldonado uses unusual gases, like argon and krypton, to fill the tubes, making it even more exceptional.
“Autonoetic” lands at Bermudez Projects after an especially busy year for Maldonado. Tens of thousands of mask-wearing Angelenos saw one of her most ambitious pieces to date, “Unconcealed,” at LA downtown’s FIGat7th shopping center from February to May, 2021. (If you missed it, its 3-foot inner-lit moon is part of the current exhibit.) And many thousands more have seen her in recently-aired commercials for MINI USA and Bose Quietcomfort Earbuds. The latter celebrates the diverse creatives of Los Angeles, and shows her at work bending her neon tubes.
Looking back at her childhood and those late night drives to pick up her mom, Maldonado says “the Strip’s neon signs represented an exciting adult life of autonomy that I couldn’t wait to arrive at.” In “Autonoetic,” which summons those memories, Maldonado has arrived.
Leticia Maldonado (b. 1980) was born in West Covina, California, and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her mastery over shaping (known in neon parlance as bending) is visible throughout her artistic oeuvre. Intricate roses, delicate birds, and hard sgraffito surfaces illustrate a passion for the craft, as well as an innate understanding of transforming emotions into sculpture.
Maldonado is a virtuoso neon bender in her own right. Her artwork challenges the conventions of what sculpture is, as well as pushing neon to go beyond its own limitations, transcending the traditional “street shop sign” toward a purer form a creative expression.
Her works have been included in museum group exhibits, including “She Bends: Women in Neon,” “LIT: Light in Transmission,” and “Construyendo puentes en época de muros,” which travelled to six major cities throughout Mexico. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.