Marisa DeLuca with HereIn

Eleven Eleven, 2022, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in.

[Image description: A tightly cropped view of the bottom of a glass-paned door inside a house. Warm light beams onto the floor from a window outside the frame.]

Deeply committed to preserving the spirit of the ever-changing landscape of Oceanside, California, Marisa DeLuca’s photorealistic paintings anchor the viewer in each space she commemorates.  DeLuca’s work is not only a glimpse of Oceanside, but a moment of something we all can relate to—the closeness to familiar places, observation of change, and the peculiar relationship between time and memory. DeLuca spoke with HereIn Intern Lainey Tomasoski about place, process, and how facilitating an emotional experience for viewers is the ultimate “payday.”

HereIn: I find your work so exciting because it speaks powerfully to the visual images of place that we form from personal memory. And for you, that particular place is Oceanside. You have defined it as  a “nonverbal language for the ephemeral,” which I thought was a perfect way to specify this very real feeling that we all understand. You are also capturing a catastrophic change happening in  Oceanside. Can you tell me about what that change is for you? Is it environmental, cultural, familial, or maybe all of them at the same time?

Marisa DeLuca: This body of work started out based on gentrification. When I came out of the COVID lockdowns, everything had changed. Pre-COVID, change was happening much more slowly. There were big hotels everywhere and the landscape seemed to change overnight, so I really wanted to preserve what was being lost. I would see old houses or old spaces that had been a communal space or a familiar landmark for me. I wanted to hang on to those and memorialize them. Obsessing over these older spaces got me interested in the history of Oceanside, so I began to look into those stories. That's where the idea of catastrophic change began to emerge.

So I dove into the Oceanside Historical Society's archives and recognized that there were repeating cycles of catastrophic change since the city's founding. Every economic level up was just another cycle of gentrification. Most of my work is based on my own photography, but I did a small series of works last summer where I referenced photos from the Oceanside Historical Society. I ended up reading a couple of books that had been written by the director of the Historical Society, Kristi Hawthorne. Large swaths of the city are  being demolished and built into something different, because the underlying goal for the city government has always been to promote tourism. That's what I'm talking about when it comes to change—it's the loss of a spirit of place and a disregard for communal memory. At the same time, as economic development raises the price of housing, locals are displaced, leaving remaining community members feeling alienated. As the visual landscape changes and becomes homogenized, the familiar faces of community members disappear. The feeling is uncanny.

HereIn: We're in a moment in the contemporary art world right now when it seems like gestural styles of painting are dominant. Tell me about your choice of using a photorealistic approach for your work.

DeLuca: The artistic choices that I've made reflect my close attention to observational painting and traditional use of linear perspective. This true-to-life approach has to do with my fidelity towards memorializing and honoring those specific places—keeping them how I last remembered—at least with my more realistic pieces. There's something that's important about those details for me. If we forget these memories, who will remember them? I want to be the one who remembers. I've always obsessed over the details, so it's really fun for me to get into all of that.

The Dress, 2021, oil on canvas, 30 x 28 in.

[Image description: A view of the side of a pale green house with an iron fence stretching across the foreground. A white string on the fence holds up a white dress to dry. The stark whiteness of the dress is contrasted with the cast iron gate and dirty wood planks in the unkempt yard.]

HereIn: In your Spectre series, you use architectural space and shadow to capture what you’ve said it feels like to “belong to a space full of ghosts.” I love that phrasing because these images act as signifiers of time, or rather of time stopped.  I find that the way you employ buildings and living spaces is effective because they can hold so much in terms of loss but also preservation of the past. I'm a very nostalgic person. Does your work come from a place of nostalgia? 

DeLuca: Well, I think that I feel nostalgia at times, and then I feel embarrassed for myself. It's kind of corny, but it's still sweet. I started to ask myself that question—is this nostalgia? What am I doing here? When I first started making the Or No Side series, I was taking classes with Grant Kester at UC San Diego, who is really big on socially engaged practice. I got into this revolutionary spirit, like, “Okay, this is going to be socially engaged work about gentrification.” However, the more I thought about it, I felt that sure, art can change things, but I don't really see how traditional oil paintings of spaces are going to translate into a big revolutionary movement. I can't go to City Hall with them. So it’s not socially engaged work, necessarily. It’s not just nostalgia for the past. So what is it?

I started to come to terms with this realization that I was expressing feelings that I didn't have words for. That's why I say it's  nonverbal language, because I couldn't really figure it out—I knew it wasn't nostalgia, per se. It was something deeper than that. It was this mourning of these spaces, and not just these spaces for me and my personal experience in them, but the mourning for these spaces throughout time and these other histories that were all kind of layered on top of this space that had not been honored and had been forgotten.

Works, 2023, oil and pyrolyzed remains of 608 Minnesota Avenue, Oceanside CA on canvas, 8 x 12 in.

[Image description: An ethereal image that looks like multiple photographs layered on top of each other. One appears to be an adobe-style archway, while another is a line of men in early-20th century work clothing.] 

There was a pivotal moment in looking at the history of Oceanside, when I learned about a graveyard right on the corner where the 78 meets the 5 freeway. There's a steakhouse there now but it had been an Oceanside pioneer graveyard that fell into disrepair.  In the seventies someone had bought the property, sold it to developers, and they disposed of the bodies in the most dishonorable way. It made me think about my role as a person who remembers when everyone else forgets.  How sad is it to think there are people who participated in the founding of this very special city that nobody even knows about anymore, and their bones are gone? I realized it was so much more than nostalgia, and I still can’t quite put my finger on what that feeling is.

And I started to feel weird, like haunted about it. I go to old graveyards in Oceanside and take imprints and photographs of graves.  I got interested in theorists who engaged with these ideas, especially Walter Benjamin. I got turned on to Mark Fisher, Jacques Derrida—just all of these thinkers who are discussing time, space, and memory as non-linear phenomena. It doesn't happen all the time. I don't walk through Oceanside just, like, haunted everywhere, but sometimes I'll be somewhere and I'll see a space, and I get a feeling like I should take a picture to save for later. And then later that same feeling returns when I spend hours carefully painting the details. There’s this connection between historical figures that I knew were there in that space, and some people that are just anonymous—but whoever they are, we're connected. It’s a reverence. I feel like this practice of remembrance means something to those long-forgotten people in a spiritual way.

HereIn: That might not mean anything to City Hall, but it means something to you and it means something to those you are remembering. And also to those who have known Oceanside through these changes and want to remember, just as you are doing. Do you feel a responsibility to remember?

DeLuca: Yes, that's a great way to put it.

Brooks Street (The Place that Burned) , 2021, charcoal on paper, 24 x 18 in

[Image description: A stark, black-and-white drawing of a chain link fence, through which the side of an industrial building is visible. Shadows demarcate what may be a door or a set of stairs in the center of the image.]

HereIn: Tell me a little about your artistic process. How do your experiences in Oceanside affect the mediums you use?

DeLuca: I work with oil, drawing media, and watercolor sometimes. Graduate school has given me new opportunities for material experimentation, which is so exciting.  I've always played around with less conventional materials, but I started to do it with more intention, collecting materials from spaces in Oceanside that are in the process of being demolished. I have a collection of site-specific materials in my garage: wood, sign letters, old light fixtures, that kind of stuff. The challenging and fun part is figuring out how I'm going to infuse my paintings with these precious remains of the city. I really love to paint, so I got some wood from an older home that was being demolished. I researched how to make my own charcoal out of the wood, and then how to make the charcoal into oil paint. I made about fifteen little paintings. Keeper is the name of that series. I find this idea really beautiful, that memory is imprinted on this material; the lived experience of that space, it is in some way recorded in that material.   

Recently there was a fire on the Oceanside pier.  The day after that happened, I was filled with emotion. I was sad, but also overwhelmed with an urgency to get down to the beach and make sense of what had happened, and also to collect some of the remains of the pier off the shore. I was able to get two bags full of perfectly usable charcoal from the fire. Even before Oceanside was incorporated as a city, the pier has been a big part of the identity of Oceanside. In a time and place where the commons is getting eroded more and more, and as capitalism destroys community, the pier is a  place that’s open to all. You can fish there, you can visit with people, you can be in community in this space.  To be able to have that material, it's so precious to me. It's like having your loved one's ashes, like I feel a reverence for these remains. In a metaphorical sense it’s like having the remains of the city I once knew, which is disappearing.

H&M Military Supplies, 2021, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.

[Image description: A photorealistic closeup of sky blue tile with dirty grout. To the left of center, there is a four-pointed diamond design in the tile, and a series of cracks appear in the lower right.] 

HereIn: Tell me about your choice of subject in your work—buildings and their shadows, broken architecture. What is your thought process when you’re capturing these spaces?

DeLuca: I think the architecture is really just a backdrop for the atmosphere in front of it. All of the spaces that I paint feature architecture that has already been demolished or is in the process of being demolished. I'm really selective when I choose which spaces to shoot. I see a place and I think, ”Oh, it seems like it's on its way out.”  I can tell when I see that paint is peeling or the windows are boarded up.  It's been cathartic to paint it but it's also really sad when the place does get demolished, like the feeling you get when you lose an old friend. A bittersweet melancholy.

The painting becomes a simulacrum for the space that was, because the building is gone; the conditions that created that space are gone, and the photograph is not public. I don't really publish any of my photographs so the only thing that really remains for people to experience is the painting.

HereIn: Do you have any last thoughts or concluding remarks that you would like us to takeaway from your work?

DeLuca: One takeaway I'd like to leave the viewer is the importance of communal memory, how remembering our roots together brings us collective strength. I think a lot about how communal memory gives us a foundation to support shared identity as opposed to self-centered individualism.

When we're in community and we interact in the public commons, we push back against the alienation and competition that is characteristic of late-stage capitalism. So when I paint Oceanside, it's my way to be in community with other Osiders.  I do spend a lot of time in different kinds of community advocacy—I'm on the City Arts Commission, I participate in a group called Dear City of Oceanside that is fighting for arts funding in low-income neighborhoods, and I just got on the board of California for the Arts/California Arts Advocates. I accepted the fact that, okay, my paintings aren't going to be the overtly revolutionary part. So what causes do I believe in that are connected to my community and how can I get engaged in that way?

HereIn: Art is a lot about shared human experience and I think that's one of the best things that you can get out of viewing and creating art. I'm sure you're creating that for a lot of people. And you just said your work isn't revolutionary in terms of social change, but it can be pretty radical for the people viewing it. And that's really important too.

DeLuca: That's something so special about the arts and humanities that I hope we can preserve as AI and these technologies come in. I transmit a feeling through my painting and you receive and experience it, but then also experience your own feelings generated by viewing it as well.  It's like, yes, it worked! I don't care if I sell any paintings, but I love it when that happens. That's the real payday for me.

This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.