839 presents Echoes, Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales’s first solo show in Los Angeles, featuring cyanotypes, vessels, and multimedia installation. Her work draws from ancestral ties and natural materials to explore transformation and memory. Blue—used in pigment and light—acts as a symbolic anchor. Referencing historical photography, postcolonial critique, and personal heritage, Wallace-Gonzales constructs a nonlinear visual archive centered on metamorphosis, presence, and embodied history.
Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales (b. 1992, Santa Barbara, California) is a Black and Mexican multidisciplinary artist using a variety of materials including ceramics, collage, resin, cyanotypes, wearables, installation, and sound. Her work draws parallels between the body and nature through the use of flora and fauna alongside the human form, while simultaneously engaging with body language, distortion, archetype, myth, and metaphor. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College in New York. She was an artist-in-residence at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard in 2018. She has exhibited at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Carnegie Art Museum (Oxnard, CA), Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) (San Jose, CA), Beta Epochs (Los Angeles), Atkinson Gallery at SBCC (Santa Barbara); and The Basic Premise Gallery, The Historical Ojai Jail, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation (all Ojai, CA), and more. She has served on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara since 2023.
