At Jeffrey Deitch in SoHo, Aparicio transforms rubber, tree surfaces, personal objects, and fragments of Los Angeles into an exhibition about disaster, displacement, and the histories embedded in the urban environment.

A car slows beside a highway accident. Drivers turn their heads. For a moment, someone else’s misfortune becomes a spectacle—close enough to watch, distant enough to avoid.

That uneasy act of looking gives Eddie R. Aparicio’s exhibition Rubberneckers its title. On view at Jeffrey Deitch’s 18 Wooster Street gallery in New York, the exhibition brings together new works shaped by the artist’s experience of the 2025 Eaton Fire and his long-standing investigation into the material and social histories of Los Angeles. Running September 12 through October 31, 2026, it is Aparicio’s first exhibition at the gallery. citeturn294761search2

The title points toward more than curiosity. Aparicio uses the image of spectators watching a disaster from behind glass to consider a culture increasingly accustomed to consuming crisis at a safe distance—through car windows, screens, and images detached from the lives affected.

In this exhibition, the landscape is not a passive backdrop. Trees, utility infrastructure, rubber, and found objects become witnesses.

After the Fire

In January 2025, the Eaton Fire destroyed Aparicio’s home in Altadena, along with thousands of other structures. The fire’s aftermath became a defining context for the works presented in Rubberneckers. The exhibition does not approach disaster only through images of destruction. Instead, Aparicio examines the systems, materials, and unequal vulnerabilities that shape the places people inhabit. citeturn294761search2

The artist had already been exploring how Los Angeles distributes infrastructure and environmental risk unevenly across its neighborhoods. His 2024 commission Muñecas de transmisión for Prospect.6 in New Orleans transformed electrical transmission towers into dolls dressed in family clothing, connecting utility infrastructure with domestic memory and the communities living alongside it.

In Rubberneckers, electrical infrastructure returns in distorted form. A utility-company sunburst logo appears across several paintings, fragmented and embedded in scenes of the burned landscape. The image only resolves as the viewer shifts position, turning recognition into an act of looking—and reconsidering what may be hidden in plain sight. citeturn294761search2

The Tree as Archive

Aparicio’s ongoing Caucho series anchors the exhibition.

Since 2015, he has used liquid rubber to make casts of ficus trees in Los Angeles neighborhoods, including Mid-City and Pico-Union. He applies layers of rubber to tree trunks over several weeks, then peels the material away, preserving the irregular surface as a kind of impression or skin. citeturn294761search2

The resulting works record details that might otherwise disappear: staple holes from old flyers, graffiti, exhaust discoloration, scratches, and marks left by people passing through the city.

These are not neutral textures. They are traces of use, labor, conflict, and everyday life.

Many of the ficus trees Aparicio works with have been marked for removal as their roots outgrow surrounding sidewalks. The casts preserve the trees’ surfaces at a moment when the living originals may be altered or lost. The artist’s process thus becomes a form of documentation—one that holds environmental change and neighborhood history in the same material. citeturn294761search2

The work also connects to Aparicio’s broader interest in rubber’s history. Rubber has a long history as an Indigenous material in the Americas and as a commodity shaped by colonial extraction and global trade. For the artist, its meaning cannot be separated from those histories. citeturn294761search1turn294761search4

The Stitch That Shows Its Labor

The wall works in Rubberneckers carry another kind of history along their edges.

Aparicio hand-sews them using diente de lobo, or “wolf’s tooth,” a stitch associated with his grandmother’s practice of making dolls from clothing left behind by relatives who disappeared during the Salvadoran Civil War.

Rather than concealing the seams, Aparicio leaves the ends of new thread hanging. The visible stitching makes the labor of joining part of the work itself. citeturn294761search2

This detail connects personal and collective memory.

Clothing can carry the presence of someone who is absent. A stitch can preserve a gesture passed through generations. A seam can reveal the work required to hold fragments together.

In Aparicio’s hands, these materials do not simply decorate the composition. They make the history of making visible.

Amber and the Objects People Entrust

A new group of amber works introduces a different kind of archive.

The materials inside these sculptures are personal objects and fragments that residents have given Aparicio during months of conversations in the neighborhoods where he works. Encased within amber-like forms, the objects appear suspended, preserved like specimens in fossilized resin. citeturn294761search2

The works shift the exhibition’s focus from what a city leaves on its surfaces to what its residents choose to share.

These objects are not merely found materials. They arrive through relationships and exchanges. Their significance rests partly in the trust involved in handing something over—and in the artist’s responsibility to preserve its presence.

The amber forms suggest preservation, but they also raise questions about what an archive can hold. Official records often leave out ordinary lives, particularly those of marginalized communities. Aparicio’s sculptures offer another way to register those histories.

Columns, Trees, and Ordered Landscapes

A new group of column works extends the artist’s investigation into sculpture.

Made from street trees, the works transform uprooted organic material into upright, ordered forms. Their arrangement recalls both minimalist sculpture and the grids used to organize agricultural fields and city streets. citeturn294761search2

The reference to minimalist artist John McCracken is accompanied by a more critical reflection on the history of collecting pre-Columbian objects without fully confronting their origins.

Aparicio brings these histories into contact with the living landscape. The tree becomes a sculptural column, but it also remains evidence of an urban system that shapes nature according to human needs.

The works suggest a tension between organic growth and imposed order: between a living thing and the structures that determine where it can exist.

A Landscape Without Human Figures

One striking feature of Rubberneckers is the absence of human figures.

Aparicio’s works are often larger than a single body, a deliberate choice connected to his understanding of the tree as a record of many people’s interactions over time. A trunk can carry marks accumulated across decades; the work, he suggests, should hold a comparable scale of collective experience. citeturn294761search2

The absence of people does not make the exhibition impersonal.

Instead, human presence is registered indirectly—in the objects residents share, the clothes used in stitched works, the marks left on bark, the infrastructure crossing neighborhoods, and the materials altered by fire.

The landscape becomes a portrait without faces.

From Los Angeles to New York

Born in Los Angeles in 1990, Aparicio grew up in Salvadoran communities in the city. His practice connects material experimentation with Central American diasporic histories, ecological justice, and the politics of place. His work was the subject of MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2023–24, and he participated in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and Prospect.6 in New Orleans. citeturn294761search1turn294761search2

That background matters to Rubberneckers, but the exhibition does not reduce the work to autobiography. The artist’s personal experience of fire becomes one point of entry into larger questions: whose neighborhoods are exposed to risk, whose histories are preserved, and what forms of attention are possible after a disaster?

New York viewers encounter a Los Angeles landscape, but the questions travel. Urban trees, public infrastructure, environmental vulnerability, migration, and the consumption of disaster are not confined to one city.

Looking Beyond the Spectacle

The title Rubberneckers describes a familiar behavior, but Aparicio complicates the viewer’s position.

To look at disaster is not necessarily to understand it. A spectacle can make suffering visible while keeping its causes and consequences at a distance.

Aparicio asks viewers to look longer—and at different things.

At the surface of a tree. At a seam. At an object entrusted by a neighbor. At the material history of rubber. At the infrastructure that crosses a landscape.

These details resist the speed of spectacle. They ask for attention to what remains after the headline, the photograph, or the passing glance.

At Jeffrey Deitch, Rubberneckers turns the city into an archive of accumulated traces. Its materials carry histories that are environmental, familial, political, and often overlooked.

The exhibition’s most lasting proposition may be that looking is not the same as witnessing. To witness requires a willingness to recognize the relationships behind what is seen.

Eddie R. Aparicio: Rubberneckers is on view at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, New York, through October 31, 2026. citeturn294761search2