Brothers Alejandro and Javier Arreguin spent much of their childhood in the realm of immigrant kitchen work: Their father worked in kitchens as long as they can remember. And ultimately, they stepped into the roles themselves. “I started working in kitchens when I was 15,” Alejandro Arreguin said. “We inherit these positions.”
In “La Jaula Dorada,” a new exhibition with the Oceanside arts nonprofit Hill Street Country Club, the Arreguin brothers celebrate the everyday physical and emotional sacrifices of kitchen work that they say people don’t often pay attention to.
The show’s title translates to “the golden cage,” inspired by a line in a song — music, Alejandro Arreguin noted, is important to him and to the kitchen worker culture. He paraphrased the line roughly as: “What do I need all this money for if I’m still inside of this golden cage?”
The Tools of the Trade
The exhibition includes several large installations, primarily using the materials kitchen workers use each day. One wall includes an array of snapshots of kitchen workers printed on real, used order tickets, using a non-traditional method that combines smartphone photography, acetone-based Chartpak markers with heat-based Xerox printing. “All of these photographs are taken while working,” Alejandro Arreguin said.
For another group of pieces, the Arreguin used a water-based method to transfer portraiture of kitchen workers onto grease-stained pots, pans and trays, including one of their own father.
The subject in each pan photograph is still in the kitchen, however, but relaxing, eating or laughing. “They don’t have a breakroom,” Alejandro Arreguin said. He also spoke of the physical, emotional and environmental relationship with the kitchen evident in the images: scarred, calloused and exhausted bodies sharing meals together.
A large-scale collage of receipts, Alejandro Arreguin’s favorite piece, shows the meta nature of creating art within their own community. His coworkers know that he makes art with receipts, and one kitchen worker affixed a bunch of tickets to his body, posing. “They’re like, ‘Hey Alejandro, take a picture of me!’” he said. “It looks like he could be a saint.” On the print, they added halos around the individual’s head and a message about paydays and holiness.
“This is not a political approach,” said Alejandro Arreguin, though he added that focusing on a class of workers generally consisting of immigrants is inherently political. “It’s about having a community and being conscious of these workers that are never seen.”
There’s also a timelapse video and poetry installation tucked behind a patchwork curtain stitched from front-of-house black napkins and back-of-house stained white rags. And a looped sound recording fills the gallery space with the low-grade, frantic background noise of a kitchen.
“I don’t consider myself a photographer,” said Alejandro Arreguin. “I am a multimedia artist.” His brother Javier Arreguin is a poet, spray paint artist and traditional oil painter. After dropping out of Mira Costa College, Alejandro Arreguin focused on work, and on building up this exhibition with Javier and Hill Street Country Club founder Dinah Poellnitz.
Not an Actual Country Club
Poellnitz and cofounder Margaret Hernandez opened the current home of Hill Street Country Club inside the LinkSoul golf apparel company three years ago, and have been in business as a pop-up gallery for more than seven years. For them, it’s not about putting Oceanside on the map, or even San Diego. Hill Street Country Club aims to provide space for artists in a way that’s not just free of the philosophic restraints of generational wealth, but also doesn’t require it.
“We really want to focus on making sure that local artists have a solo exhibition space and that they’re curated and treated like contemporary artists and not like coffee shop artists,” Poellnitz said. “Because every artist has the potential to be a solo exhibition artist. They just need the space and they need that curator communication and conversation.”
Poellnitz repeats a mantra — personal, communal, universal — that’s part of Hill Street’s mission. “Art has to be personal in order to convey a communal and universal message,” she said.
“La Jaula Dorada” achieves all of those things. The intensely personal glimpse into a group — immigrant kitchen workers, mostly men — not traditionally associated with vulnerability, the cohesion of kitchen community and the universality of the invisible working class make it relatable. “Like, how is this work not relatable in Chicago or New York or L.A. or Tucson?” she asked.
Oceanside Evolving
Raised in the Oceanside area, Poellnitz said that she’s seen the community change and gentrify, but also cling to its roots. Pointing to a fallen sign across the street, Poellnitz said, “I’m kind of glad that my mortuary is having a hard time fixing their sign right now. It’s been like that for two months.”
Along with helping Oceanside evolve its art scene, she has also personally evolved. “When I revisit what we used to do three or four years ago, god, we were hustling. Now I’m just kind of chilling and being really picky about choosing my battles,” Poellnitz said. “I truly believe that you don’t waste your time fighting institutions. You take that energy and you go build new ones. I mean, what’s the point of fighting a giant when you can just build a new one?”
As Poellnitz’s participation in civic arts and culture organizations also ramps up (Oceanside has its own Arts Commission as well as a committee for its recently acquired status as a California Cultural District), Hill Street is growing too. The benefit art show she helped develop earlier this year to support local artists with health-related expenses, Artists for Artists, will also become a foundational project to provide a variety of mini grants to artists.
And in a few months, Hill Street will work with the Oceanside Public Library on a California Arts Council Local Impact grant to provide pre-packaged art projects that families can take home.
“La Jaula Dorada” runs through mid-November. “There’s so much love and respect in this show,” Poellnitz said. “These are the people that scrub your utensils. These are the gods you don’t see before you pray over your food.”
Iconic Tunes, National Portraits and More Arts and Culture News and Events
Visual Art
- On Wednesday, there’s a free, public guest lecture by textiles artist Diedrick Brackens, the 2019 Longenecker-Roth artist in residence at UCSD. Bonus points for the phrase “calculated woven algorithms” in that event description.
- San Diego artist Hugo Crosthwaite wins the National Portrait Gallery prize and will have the opportunity to create a portrait of a living individual for the National Gallery. (Art Forum)
- La Bodega’s annual skull show takes place this Saturday.
Music
- The La Jolla Symphony and Chorus hosts a free “Young People’s Concert,” followed by an open dress rehearsal on Friday. Then, on Saturday and Sunday, the orchestra performs its season opener, combining Rossini’s William Tell Overture with a Béla Bartók concerto and a piece by 1930s-1950s composer Florence Price, with soloist Peter Clarke on violin.
- On Halloween night, basically every local band you know has some representation in the Cure-themed group concert at the Whistle Stop.
Literature and Film
- I love it when the subtitled, indie critics’ darlings get the AMC treatment. Go see “Parasite.” (U-T)
- On Saturday, the San Diego Park and Rec Department hosts a screening of “Coco” at the Mt. Hope cemetery. Go spook yourself out. Free.
- San Diego’s own Elizabeth Earley celebrates her new book, “Like Wings, Your Hands,” in conversation with the amazing Kazim Ali at Book Catapult on Saturday.
Theater and Dance
- Carl Orff’s iconic “Carmina Burana” is brought to life this weekend by the City Ballet and Chorus, plus “Straw Feet,” a contemporary ballet by Elizabeth Wistrich, the company’s co-director.
- Old Town’s Day of the Dead celebration is this weekend with a three-day, jam-packed schedule of dance, performance, puppetry, vendors and more.
- “Hermanas (Sisters)” is an original Day of the Dead-themed play (set in City Heights!) that debuts as part of a collaboration with the Old Globe’s AXIS and coLAB projects on Sunday. Free.
Tech, Science and Culture
- The “Joy of Search” author Dan Russell, “ϋber tech lead” at Google, will speak at UCSD about the ways in which enhancing human intelligence through tech diverges from artificial intelligence. And I can’t help but think about this article: “How to Think Without Googling.” (Forge)
- Eric Klinenberg, the author of “Palaces for the People,” was in town last week to give a talk at the downtown library on the importance of public spaces for intellectual and social betterment. If you missed it, you can listen to his appearance on Midday Edition. (KPBS)
Closing Soon
- Julio M. Romeo’s “Borderlands” exhibition at Tijuana’s Centro Cultural closes Nov. 17.
- Closing Sunday: Maximum Minimum, a group show at Visual in North Park that features new works by Kaori Fukuyama, Michael James Armstrong, Christian Garcia-Olivo and Allan Morrow.
Food, Etc.
- An early critic of my culture reporting said he almost gave up on me after I revealed my beer hate regarding the endlessness and relentlessness of San Diego Beer Week. But have I not delivered the beer news to you anyway, all year long? And even drank some? Are you not entertained? My point is that it’s San Diego Beer Week-and-a-half again. Ten days of craft beer and brewing with 500 beer events. Ten days!
- Here’s a mouth-watering and comprehensive guide to the Halloween-themed cocktails around San Diego. (San Diego Magazine)
- Kilowatt Brewing celebrates the grand opening of its Forbidden Cove tiki beer haven on Friday. (West Coaster)
- Vaping poisoning link is quite the buzzkill for disgraced Carlsbad-based “Hemp Hookahzz.” (Observer)
- A pair of UCSD students just opened a new fast food restaurant, FireBirds Chicken, in City Heights, and they want to go big. (Eater)
What’s Inspiring Me Right Now
- Everyone is talking about this dedicated issue of the Washington Post Magazine solely by writers and photographers who have served time, particularly this piece by journalist — and felon — Keri Blakinger, who visited San Diego’s Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility, a women’s jail, to understand the ways in which the criminal justice system is trying to better serve the unique and historically neglected needs of women. “If you only focus on men, it never seems to get better for women.”