Jeohsua Palma / VLAD

Work

Selected work

Images, field studies, and visual systems shaped by place, pressure, memory, and transformation.

Route

Three grounds, one evolving way of seeing

Geography is method. Nezahualcóyotl, Astoria, and Los Angeles.

Uto-Aztecan branches

Numic
Takic
Hopi
Tubatulabal
Tepiman
Opatan
Tarahumaran
Cahita
Corachol
Nahuan

Documented ranges of a language family. Numic, Takic, Hopi, and Tubatulabal are Northern. The others are Southern. Not national borders, and not a claim of land or authority.

Based in Los Angeles, CA

Nezahualcóyotl

Street intelligence, survival, poetry, labor, family memory, improvisation, and the force of the urban edge.

Astoria

Bridges, waterfront, infrastructure, trains, neighbors, industrial residue, and photography as everyday witness.

Los Angeles

Distance, basin geography, river systems, construction, migration, Southern California language history, cinematic space, and new forms of relation.

01

Hollywood Hills

Los Angeles, CA

34°08′N 118°19′W

Based in Los Angeles, CA

02

Hell Gate Bridge

Astoria, New York

40°47′N 73°55′W

03

El Coyote de Neza

Nezahualcóyotl

19°24′N 99°01′W

Practice

Photography as witness. Trade knowledge as method. Spiritual inquiry as relation.

A self-taught practice. Photography first. Plumbing and mechanical work as a way of reading hidden systems, not as a résumé.

Based in Los Angeles

In practice

Jeohsua Palma / VLAD is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist working through photography, moving image, visual studies, urban observation, and material research. Years of plumbing and mechanical work trained him to read systems that are usually hidden: flow behind walls, pressure inside lines, failure revealed by stains, sound, temperature, obstruction, corrosion, and rupture.

That practical way of seeing carries into the art. A photograph can be treated like a diagnostic image. A street can be read as infrastructure and archive at the same time. A place-name can hold a history that the contemporary map does not explain.

The work asks what becomes visible when a system fails, when a surface is disturbed, or when memory returns. Photography remains the primary instrument.

Third Place, Citywide Graphic Arts Competition, 2018, Digital Photography

@jeohsua

01

Trace

Photographs, place-names, stains, scars, ruins, residue, sound, and archival fragments.

02

Flow

Water, plumbing, rivers, migration, circulation, speech, pressure, and movement through the city.

03

Rupture

Breakage, displacement, colonization, obstruction, leakage, loss of transmission, demolition, illness, and failure.

04

Relation

Family, place, distant language kinship, community, inherited memory, and the ethics of not collapsing difference.

05

Return

Repair, retrieval, recollection, descent, reassembly, transformation, and coming back changed.

Research

Land, material, and return

A research layer inside the practice. Not a tribal claim, and not the only subject of the work.

Land + language

Documented place-names, language-family research, and the distinction between archive, studio, and relation.

Studio

Material systems

Water, infrastructure, plumbing, construction, pressure, flow, failure, and repair.

Relation

Descent + return

Quetzalcóatl, Mictlan, memory, retrieval, transformation, and personal spiritual inquiry.

Systems that are easy to ignore until they rupture

Nezahualcóyotl, Astoria, Los Angeles

Quetzalcóatl and Mictlan enter my work as structures for thinking about descent and recovery: what must be entered, excavated, or broken open before something buried can return in another form. I approach these traditions through study and personal spiritual interpretation rather than as a claim of ceremonial office.

My practice begins with systems that are easy to ignore until they rupture.

I learned this materially through plumbing and mechanical work. Pressure stays invisible until something leaks. Corrosion hides until a fitting fails. Water follows paths built long before it becomes visible at the surface. That way of reading symptoms changed the way I photograph cities.

I use photography, moving image, field research, and visual studies to trace what remains inside streets, landscapes, bodies, language, and built systems. I am drawn to bridges, pipes, water, construction, religious signs, damaged surfaces, place-names, light, and the small evidence left behind by movement and repair.

My familial Mazatec ancestry belongs to my personal relationship with Mexico, memory, healing, and spiritual inquiry. Separately, I study Nahua and Mexica thought and documented Uto-Aztecan language relationships as historical and philosophical material. I do not treat related languages as a single people, and I do not use linguistic kinship as a claim to tribal authority or land ownership.

Quetzalcóatl returns in the work as a figure of descent and retrieval. Mictlan becomes a way of thinking about what must be entered before something lost can be recovered. In Nahua sources, destinations after death were not one place. These are not decorative symbols to me. They are structures for thinking about memory, death, repair, transformation, and return.

Photography lets me remain with evidence. The camera cannot restore what has disappeared, but it can hold a trace long enough to look again. I am interested in that interval, between damage and repair, archive and invention, what can be documented and what can only be felt.

Jeohsua "VLAD" Palma

Film