Atelier Delphine People: Patricia Fernández & Ian James
Learn about Patricia, Ian, Luna, and Ea's stories.
PATRICIA & IAN X ATELIER DELPHINE
The current Atelier Delphine studio is located on Chung King Road in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Much of this street, including our building, was built during the New Chinatown era of the 1930s and 1940s, and Chung King Road is a unique pedestrian-only street inaccessible by car. Most of the buildings on the street were designed to have living quarters on the second floor and stores on the first. In the decades since the 1940s, as the original families moved and business owners retired, the buildings were purchased or leased and repurposed as studios, galleries, and divided living spaces. The establishment of the contemporary art scene on Chung King Road turned it into an art destination starting in the 1990s.
When I moved into a ground-floor unit in the middle of the street in June 2021, I immediately met all the neighbors as it is now a close community of longterm tenants, shopowners, creative offices, galleries, and other residents. Our neighbors include Death Doula LA and Now Instant Image Hall. Patricia and Ian live in the apartment above the studio with their daughter Luna, born in 2021, and Bengal cat named Ea.
Patricia Fernández is an artist born in Burgos, Spain, who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work includes a research aspect out in the field, as well as a painting and object making studio practice. Her works emerge from an interest in history, texture and time contained within landscape. She uses personal narrative, memory, omission, and abstraction to transmit histories and build connections between people and places. Painting, drawing, carving and object making are the tools used to recuperate an unknown history.
Ian James was born in Ohio and now lives and works in Los Angeles. While he primarily works in photography, Ian is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the metaphysics of objects. In addition, James has been making journeys to photograph pyramid
architecture throughout North America and Europe as a form of late capitalist pilgrimage. The images he makes become a material substance for cast frame
works, assemblages, sculptures, books, videos, etc. He teaches at Otis College of Art & Design, ArtCenter College of Design, and Pasadena City College.
I am excited to share a little bit of their stories: a snippet of our conversation below, with photos taken right outside our studio and their home in Chinatown as well as their second home in Joshua Tree. Patricia and Ian wear styles from our Core Collection and special Archival pieces.
Atelier Delphine: Can you tell us a little bit about where you both came from and how you both wound up in Los Angeles?
Patricia Fernández: I was born in Burgos, Spain, but six months after that I was living in Puerto Rico with my family. I remember growing up on the beach! We went back to Spain every year where all of my family lives, and summer in the village, everyone together. I remember going to France a lot as a kid and we would always roadtrip across countries. I think I have a big family. As a child I also lived in Den Haag, Holland. Every five years or so my dad would move for his job so we went wherever he got sent! I came to Los Angeles as a teenager and I didn't like it very much at first. I did a year of University in London, England, but then eventually moved back to LA. I always enjoyed traveling around with my family because my dad ended up working in Brussels, New York, Beirut and some other exciting places.
Ian James: I grew up in a rural town about 25 miles west of Cincinnati, in a town named after the shortest serving president. I lived across the street from endless corn fields, and later moved even further out of town surrounded by trees. I left when I turned 18 to move to Columbus for undergraduate. I moved to Los Angeles with friends when we finished college.
AD: How did you both get into the fine art industry?
PF: I come from a family of makers. Both my maternal grandmother and paternal grandmother made clothing and were seamstresses. My grandfather on my maternal side was a woodworker. As a kid I liked watching him work and make drawings and carvings. He was funny. He sang a lot when he worked. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, enjoyed their stories and company. I think all these things connected with me as a kid so I always made drawings, invented stories and cut cardboard up to invent objects.
IJ: I studied journalism and art photography in college and then moved to Los Angeles and wanted to work in photography. While in school, I was inspired by my art professors and the graduate students and was excited about the possibility of being an artist and teaching in higher education, where one could be surrounded by critical engagement and supported in their work. When I moved to Los Angeles I worked for a photography lab and went alone to a lot of gallery shows. I was excited about the growing art scene in LA and made lots of
friends there; I felt that the art world was more liberatory than the commercial photography world, where I was also freelancing, and the photojournalism world, which was collapsing.
AD: How would you describe the street of Chung King Road, Chinatown, and our building?
PF: It's a unique situation on this pedestrian street. Lots of unexpected things happen. Some days the colors make me happy, some days it feels surreal.
IJ: When I moved to LA, I lived in the Rampart Arms an old, converted hotel in McArthur Park. Later I lived in a small clapboard house, built in 1906, on a hillside in Lincoln Heights. The hillside above was terraced and otherwise undeveloped and we hosted noise shows on a decrepit quarterpipe, and later a pyramid made from shipping pallets. I moved to Chinatown and lived in a storefront without a shower for six years so I could have a studio and run an artist space with a friend called metro pcs. I moved into Patricia's apartment on Chung King Road, about two blocks north of my storefront studio, in 2019. The apartment is a small one bedroom but was perfect for all that we did and needed. The building is old with plaster walls and no a/c and fussy pipes. It's on a pedestrian street that is mostly quiet.
AD: What are three core values that you want to embrace?
PF: Happiness, peace, love, family, community! I value asking questions, intuition, and being inventive along your life path.
IJ: Adventure, expansion, investigation.
AD: Patricia, can you talk a bit about the research aspect of your work? I’d love to hear about what you do when you are "out in the field”.
PF: I think it’s important to consider research when embarking on the kind of projects i’m interested in - be it material experimentation, reading texts, walking, embarking on an interview process or a journey. I spend a lot of time
thinking about my art process and about art outside of my studio so I think that the “out in the field” or outdoor research is the balance to my interior mind space.
Sometimes I will spend years researching an idea, or concept, sometimes this work takes the form drawing or writing. Ultimately, I think that actions outside of the studio, exterior sensorial interactions, are key to the intellectual process of materializing a concept.
AD: Ian, you range over a variety of media. Do you feel drawn to one form of expression of another? What calls you to a certain medium over another at any given time?
IJ: I identify as a photographer and think about all of my work coming out of photography, even when it’s not. I was schooled in conceptual art and that the idea is the most important aspect of the work. From the idea the artist determines the best manner for the idea to exist in the world. So instead of, “I want to make a picture to represent this thing or this subject,” you instead say, “I want to work with this thing or subject as a material and the best way in my mind to manifest this is through doing x.”
I was trained in so-called “straight photography,” i.e. using a camera, film in my case, to take a photograph of something and printing that photograph in a relatively straightforward way through normative techniques without a lot of manipulation. I came to art photography through photojournalism and was enamored age 19 with artists using photography like Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Sherri Levine, and
Richard Prince. Photographers from the “Pictures” generation who were responding to photography’s vernacular uses and histories.
When I moved to Los Angeles after undergraduate, I became more and more interested with the material
possibilities of the physical photograph, as well as working in an interdisciplinary way that would decenter the photograph and allow it to become an ingredient within a work, as opposed to the central focus. During grad school and since then, I’ve worked in a lot of ways that could be considered sculptural or installation, as well as have made sound work, a sculptural FM radio station, a virtual reality environment, and most recently colored-pencil drawings on found consumer electronics.
I think I’m someone that’s never long-term satisfied to work in one specific way. I like learning new things and challenging myself and concocting new ways to think about what my work is and how it can exist as.
AD: Patricia, how do other people’s personal histories come into play in your own artwork?
PF: I’m always interested in how others experience the world, how we may have very disparate starting points yet our lives can connect in the most unexpected or subtle ways. I love to think of the idea that we are all connected like a network of fungal matter or neurons.
There’s this great quote in this book I recently read on death care (Corpse Care) that talks about we need to imagine our relations between the past and the present in this way, in order to learn how to love each other.
AD: Ian, Pyramids and vortexes play a large part in your art? Where did your interest in these things originate?
IJ: I’ve always sought out experiences that are spectacular and metaphysical and travelled to places I felt drawn to without fully knowing why. In graduate school I took a class with James Benning twice called Looking and Listening, and we would take these day trips with Benning to mysterious places of his choosing north of CalArts. Many of which had been his filming locations. He’d lead us in a wagon train of cars and we’d spend the day practicing long term observation. After graduate school, I began running a radio show on KCHUNG called Healing Light Comfort Zone that looked at the first wave of New Age music from the late ‘70s - early ‘90s. As part of research for the show, as well as for research for a new artwork, I began traveling to places like Sedona and Mt. Shasta, as well as remote hot springs throughout the Western U.S.
Eventually I started photographing, as well as shooting video,
and collecting artifacts from these places. As the pyramid motif kept recurring in the cassettes and things I was collecting for the radio show, I began to wonder if there were pyramids constructed in the U.S. and for what purpose. During a Christmas visit to see my parents, I drove to Indianapolis to photograph a set of pyramidal office towers. Six months later, I went to Memphis to photograph the Bass Pro pyramid. I thought these would be one-off photographs as I had been resistant to working in a serialized photographic manner for a long time, but the more I photographed, the more I researched and the more I found. I’ve been now making these photographs for nine years and have visited close to seventy different pyramid sites, some several times.
AD: How are you raising your daughter, Luna?
PF: We go to the studio together, sometimes she helps me. Play is very important, in the studio or in nature. I hope that she learns through playing and inventing. She goes to forest school and I hope she gets to make her own rules about learning in nature; I hope she learns about compassion by loving bugs and continues to make things with sticks. I hope that she learns to love nature and take care of the world.
AD: What art openings or events do you both have coming up?
PF: I curated an exhibition at the Death Doula Studio LA, here on Chung King Road, that ran from May-June 2024. It's part of my volunteer/community/advocacy hours as part of my death doula training. I will also be returning to Yucca Valley Material Lab in the high desert to work on some bronze sculptures, with a foundry scholarship. Also, in the next year I am working towards my second solo show at Whistle Gallery in Seoul. We are also invited to an artist residency in the whole month of August to Norway, the town called Sandnes.
IJ: I had two solo shows open this Summer, at Timeshare in Los Angeles and at Et Al in San Francisco.
AD: Can you share if your artworks are shown in some public space, and/or owned by any notable people?
PF: My work is part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection.
IJ: LACMA also acquired a piece of mine through curator Rebecca Morse's Lens program in 2022. Simpsons writer Dan Greaney also owns a few works.
AD: You’ve collaborated on several pieces together. How does that process work?
IJ: Patricia and I have a lot of shared interest in the ephemeral, experiential, and in certain types of places, as well as going into mysterious experiences without expectations. Our first collaboration was around arborglyphs made by Basque sheepherders throughout the late 1800s until about the mid-1900s made in aspen groves in California and Nevada. It was work she was already pursuing and we had recently fallen in love and we would leave on these trips nearly every weekend during the fall of 2018. A book we made together of paintings, drawings, photographs, and research materials came together pretty effortlessly with everything we were doing. From there followed two exhibitions of these works.
I think the collaboration was this outgrowth of our love and joy doing things we wanted to understand better together. When it came to planning the shows or laying out the book, making decisions, etc, I think we’re different in that she’s able to make decisions fast that feel good and I’m much more of slow decision maker that goes back and forth and weighs all the possibilities, as well as gives space and time for new possibilities to arise in thought, space, and conversation.
PF: We began collaborating in the Sierra Nevada mountains, when I was an artist in residence in Bakersfield. We were documenting arborglyhs on walks, by making alginate molds of aspen trees that were at the end of their life span, witch had all sorts of poetic markings, year dates and figurative drawings on them. The tree carvings were made by Basque immigrant sheepherders as early as the 19th century; the stories now forgotten made these arborglyphs quite mysterious; we spent a lot of time together figuring out various ways of sharing the fragmented histories we found in the forests, on the trees. We walked a lot, travelled a lot to specific sites, following maps told by memory by some of the retired sheepherders. We took chances and followed the paths of the sheep at times.
Sometimes it felt crazy but always exciting; we were granted some resources to continue our year long collaborative project which culminated in an exhibition and then an artist book.
AD: What is a dream project that you would like to tackle either individually or together?
PF: We have a little homestead in Joshua Tree that we rebuilt during the pandemic. It was really made by hand. Having the space of five acres allowed us to start on some projects out there, and we have some yet to complete. I look forward to seeing Ian’s radio station KHLZ inside his converted trailer start to function as new age healing radio with public programming. And I have always wanted to host more dinners on an outdoor table that I carved from a slab of tree from the Sequoias. It emulates those found in the boarding houses of Bakersfield that served communal meals for coming together after a long day’s work. That’s what I would like to see collaboratively in the future, some activation of these sculptures out in the desert. Individually, I would like to continue my work on the Bone Ship, a posthumous sculpture that is constructed with promised bones of friends and allies, after death. This vessel would then carry future descendants to a communal destination.
IJ: This summer we’re going to a residency in Norway called Sandnes kommune that will allow us to work together supported by the institution with our daughter, and I’m really excited about the possibilities for that. We also are hoping to have another collaborative exhibition, potentially in Guadalajara, Mexico. We’re both interested in ritual, magic, mythology, and the legacy of matriarchal cultures, so very much hoping we are able to find the space to collaborate on those subjects.
As Patricia mentioned, we both have long term projects ongoing at our home in Joshua Tree, and hoping to complete those projects and get them both going and see what happens as they’re both community-oriented.
For my own work, I’m dying to make a film about Jose Argüelles’s archives and foundation in Ashland, Oregon, as well as find the funding and time to travel in Europe and Asia photographing the pyramids I’ve been researching, as well as continue my project on hot springs and communal bath sites.
AD: Hi Luna! How old are you? Can you share where your name come from?
Luna: I am three and then going to be four. Luna is my name. (PF: She was born on a new moon in Joshua Tree! The name was fitting.)
AD: What’s your favorite thing to do right now?
Luna: I like to go to the desert! That's it!
AD: I would love to ask about Ea. He is 4 years old now, right? How did you meet him? Can you describe his personality?
IJ: Ea is 4. We wanted a Bengal cat because Patricia was allergic to cats and these are hypoallergenic. We found a craigslist ad for Bengal
kittens in San Bernardino and Ea is from the second litter from the caterie of a woman who is from Bikers for Jesus Ministry who feeds unhoused people in Highland, her neighborhood. Ea is a blue Bengal so he is not a show cat. He was the silliest kitten so we adopted him. He's a wild cat...