Paul Pescador at Tyler Park Presents

At Tyler Park Presents, artist Paul Pescador presents two bodies of photographic work, all made in 2021. In the main gallery, the “Emancipation of P.P.” series takes up the artist’s dense, colorful, and playful style in pattern-filled photographic collages. Each contains a central cartoonish figure made up of household items and costumes (a deflated emoji beach ball becomes a sagging head, a loofa becomes a tutu). 

Surrounding these whimsical constructions are images of Pescador, who is non-binary and trans, in various outfits and poses, cut out like paper dolls. The self-portraits poignantly chronicle the artist’s own journey with hormone replacement therapy, and the portraits express a beautifully fluid identity that intermingles unexpectedly with Pescador’s comical ad-hoc characters.

The small second gallery, roughly the size of a closet, contains more intimate portraits of the artist’s own body, cropped close and marked with colored pigment. In contrast to the confetti-like compositions in the previous space, these quiet pictures hone in on skin and contain deeper shadows that elicit an interior psychology, the markings on the artist’s skin perhaps chronicling a shifting interior energy. 

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Image: Courtesy of Paul Pescador and Tyler Park Presents, Los Angeles. Photo by Elon Schoenholz.