Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere
Layers of the City
February 2 – April 14, 2019

(Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Layers of the City, 4K video, sound, installation, window graphics)

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 2 from 7-10pm

Grand Central Art Center
125 N. Broadway
Santa Ana, CA

During the summer of 2017, while artists-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, CA, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere began research toward a new project that built upon their interests combining time-based media with songwriting, the voice, and civic participation.

In July of 2018, the artists held an open call for local singers and musicians to participate in the production, which culminates in the video and sound installation at GCAC.

They began their process with the question: How might we sing our way through the transformation of place?

Nevarez and Tevere’s new work Layers of the City reflects on spaces in Santa Ana, both inhabited and boarded up, of immigrant owned entities that passed through generations only to be pushed out by rising rents and revitalization plans. The stories of Santa Ana are the stories of Sunset Park in Brooklyn, of Pilsen in Chicago, and of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles – neighborhoods where real estate speculation supersedes communities.

With these processes in mind, Nevarez and Tevere wrote a song that follows the composition and form of a cumulative song. As the song progresses, so do the amount of voices singing the chorus. In the end, a larger assembly of bodies and voices come together, perhaps forming a community, a resistant cumulative process.