Artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, affected by the Eaton fire, traces memories and time

Los Angeles Times - 00:01
The artist often engages with the concept of ever-shifting time and materiality as a tool for preserving and archiving realities. The torched properties in Altadena were a reminder of how the fire that devastated his community is connecting to his work.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio didn’t sleep the entire night before the Eaton fire hit his Altadena neighborhood in early January. The intensity of the winds and power outage had him on edge. The artist and his partner were sitting in the dark, on their phones, glued to the news as harrowing details came out of the Palisades. But Aparicio’s evening took a devastating turn when he began receiving messages from friends that a fire erupted above Pasadena.

“We could see these massive flames wicking off the top of the mountain and moving fast,” he said.

Aparicio left without knowing it would be the last time he would see his house.

The couple safely fled with their three pets — cats Bird and Mammon and a dog, Dune — and a few belongings. But his home office contained years of drawings, drafts of projects and notes. There were also paintings by his father, Juan Edgar Aparicio, an artist whose work captured the trauma of the Salvadoran civil war.

All of it was destroyed.

A rare, 100-...
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