One Work: Luciano Pimienta
For Whoever Owns the Soil, 2021, terra cotta clay, underglaze, plexiglass, and water, 24 x 18 x 32 in.
[Image description: A black, red, and white sign, which reads “No Trespassing,” is submerged in brownish water.]
A quick glance at real estate listings on Zillow shows the median price of a house in San Diego is at 950K as of May 2024. One hundred twenty-three percent higher than the national average. As residents struggle to afford the rising prices, we commit more of our time to work—and even then, for many the city becomes harder to navigate. Who gets to live here? To enjoy the sun-filled city? These are some of the themes that occupy artist Luciano Pimienta.
Pimienta was born in Los Angeles and moved to San Diego to pursue his MFA. The city surprised him—it wasn’t the border town he expected to find. But as he got to know San Diego, many things caught his eye and sparked his curiosity. He noticed how the prevalence of the recreation industry invited people to experience the city leisurely; enjoying the sun, sea, and outdoor activities were at the core of the city’s supposed identity. This dynamic, entangled with the strong military presence in San Diego, led him to reflect on this layered region and how land became commodified thorough colonization. How it became individual property tied to labor and the countless hours needed to acquire it. Tied to surveillance, demarcation, and marked perimeters. These ponderings led Pimienta back to his own personal narrative, to his upbringing and the labor his parents invested to make a living for him and his siblings. Such social, political, and personal dimensions infuse Pimienta’s recent series, Ways of Knowing (2021).
For Whoever Owns the Soil, 2021, terra cotta clay, underglaze, plexiglass, and water, 24 x 18 x 32 in.
[Image description: Left: A No Trespassing sign sits in a plexiglass tray of water on top of a wood-legged table. Right: A closeup of the No Trespassing sign as it cracks, crumbles, and dissolves in the brownish water.]
A black, red, and white No Trespassing sign floats in a tray of water on top of a wooden table. The sign, seemingly one you can get at a hardware store for under five bucks, is affixed to a stake, perhaps ready to be place on a lawn or snatched from one as someone walks by. While it looks like a typical paper and wood object, the No Trespassing sign is, in actuality, made of clay. Photos of the piece, titled For Whoever Owns the Soil, shows it slowly dissolving, breaking down in the water over the course of Pimienta’s 2022 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Encinitas, California. It sits in the gallery next to a No Sale sign and a chain-link fence, also both crafted carefully of clay.
For Whoever Owns the Soil, 2021, terra cotta clay, underglaze, plexiglass, and water, 24 x 18 x 32 in.
[Image description: Two side-by-side images of the No Trespassing sign disintegrating into increasingly rust-colored water.]
Trained in ceramics, Pimienta uses clay as an entry point to his conceptual explorations. The medium, as Pimienta told me, can last forever. Yet he manages to use the material to reflect on time and the impermanence of systems we imagine immutable. Clay is a familiar material. We can imagine the feel of it in our hands as we hold a cup to our lips, and we can imagine how after a rainshower the solid soil becomes mud. A viscous liquid puddle perfect for jumping and splashing. Pimienta captures this viscousness in some of his pieces as he submerges unfired clay in water, leaving it there to slowly dissolve. Some pieces disintegrate and become sludge. Others are a soft dust that looks like it could merge back into the soil with the next breeze. Ephemeral. Yet even as the works seem to vanish, they leave a trace.
Pimienta’s pieces move beyond stable objects expected to have a long-term duration, becoming, instead, objects in flux. The material is set in motion, transforming to convey the ideas on which Pimienta meditates. Clay’s malleability, its familiarity, its transformation from soil are points of entry for Pimienta’s exploration of labor, land, and the legacies that intertwine them. As clay dissolves into water, Pimienta entices us to pause and think of the land we stand on, the labor required to live here, and who gets to enjoy this city, to call it home.
—Maru Lopez, San Diego-based artist, educator, and craft researcher. Lopez was a participant in the 2023 HereIn Writers Workshop.