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Fía Benitez considers place and painting in Myth of Origin at CSUN Art Galleries
October 2, 2025
The Journey is the Destination: Recording Los Angeles features the work of seven LA-based artists in this multimedia group exhibition at California State University Northridge (CSUN) Art Galleries. Curated by Holly Jerger, the exhibition’s theme calls Western colonial ideas of mapping into question, handing over the power of documentation to the artists who live there–including Fía Benitez, whose new body of work Myth of Origin makes its debut in this exhibition.
Fía Benitez is a Mexican artist currently based in Los Angeles. Her research-driven practice spans drawings, paintings, sculptures, and texts that examine land and labor histories to critique enduring systems of colonial power, uncovering sites of agency through narratives of defiance and complicity. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Here, the 4N Issue 1 alum discusses her work with 4N Editor Kelly Rogers.
The Journey is the Destination: Recording Los Angeles is on view at CSUN Art Galleries through November 6, 2025.
Kelly Rogers: For this exhibition, you’re debuting 13 oil paintings. What’s your relationship like to the medium?
Fía Benítez: I’ve always loved painting, and often in my practice I call on the history of American landscape painting. I studied at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, so the Hudson River School of Painting was very much part of my education and my environment. The paintings associated with this movement visually reinforced the ideology of westward expansion and settlers’ divine right to land through its sweeping vistas and “untouched” territories. In Mexico, painters like José María Velasco created panoramic depictions of the Valley of Mexico to construct a modern, unified national identity in the wake of independence. I wanted to subtly but directly index both of these traditions, and create the context for what I want to say about landscape through my painting.
KR: I love this because the painters of the Hudson River School were overwhelmingly white men. So a not-male, not-white perspective on American landscape is really meaningful to add to the contemporary painting context. And the comparison of American and Mexican landscape paintings really tells you a lot about each culture’s relationship to land.
FB: Definitely. This time, I’m not replicating specific landscape paintings, I just wanted to work in the genre. In the spring I got to visit Vassar–I used to work at their museum, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and its foundational collection is from the Hudson River School of Painting. The Loeb had exhibitions directly responding to that legacy, people using the genre critically to complicate the aestheticized, pristine historical landscapes with their ideological underpinnings and demonstrate how it shows up in the present. And these are my peers. We’re looking at the same history and wanting to respond with our own perspective, or what we feel like is missing.
KR: Yeah, that’s so interesting. We shared your body of work, Root Rot, in the first issue of 4N, and it was very colored pencil and graphite-focused. I’m curious how you’re drawn to different mediums depending on the subject matter.
FB: Yes, it seems like my subjects inform the medium. All the graphite pictures directly stemmed from the fact that I was doing archival research and the conventions and infrastructure around it. Archives often regulate research by requiring institutional access, prohibiting photography, or limiting notation to pencil and paper. A way for me to bring things out of that space and to look at the same materials with other people was to scale them up and reproduce them. When I’m creating large scale renditions of certain documents–remediating these materials that I find in the archive–it’s from an impulse to bring the object out of a discrete space and place it in conversation with other materials and people.
KR: Because The Journey is the Destination: Recording Los Angeles is a direct survey for how these artists relate to Los Angeles on a very geographic level, what did this bring up for you in terms of placemaking, as a Mexican artist examining their relationship to a specific site?
FB: I’ve been in Los Angeles for six years and sometimes still feel like a newcomer. At the same time, I feel very connected to it through my Mexican heritage. I think there’s trouble in conflating origin with belonging. In diaspora, one can feel the spectrum of belonging and alienation with everything in between. I think the “journey” part of this exhibition is acknowledging a record of exchange between the United States and Mexico over time using my own family’s history, and placing it in a contemporary context.
KR: Right, there’s the physical journey of travel, and the emotional journey through memory. There are two maps you’ve reproduced in this series, and I find the practice of you drawing or tracing those borders to be really symbolic to the work as well.
FB: Louisiana Purchase is based on McConnell’s historical maps of the US, and La Esperanza depicts a plot of land, a ranch, that once belonged to my paternal family in Mexico and is now for sale. Between the two, there’s a massive difference in scale—a single ranch in comparison to a section of North America. I’m not a cartographer or architect, so for me to draw these sorts of maps is more like a form of image study. It’s a different kind of attention in relation to line or surface. I’m not going for precision as the main goal.
Together, they reference the practice of owning and buying land. Alternatively, one could be a steward, a visitor, or collectively hold it instead. The ownership-based logic is not one I’m necessarily subscribed to, and at the same time I’m intimately aware of and affected by those lines that are drawn in space. As I trace those lines, I think about how place can surpass the scale of the human, familial, and comprehensible to something so abstracted and vast, and who that serves.
KR: Myth of Origin was born from discovering your great great great uncle’s grave in East Los Angeles this year. Did you know, before going to grad school in LA, that there was a family connection? Or was it something you figured out after moving?
FB: I thought there was no direct connection. I love the daily experience of Los Angeles’ rich cultural history and it was surprising for me to find my relative’s grave in Calvary Cemetery. It made me feel more connected to LA.
KR: In recording details from historical documents, and playing with scale, you have to make decisions about which details to include, and what creative liberties you want to take in their depiction. Some of the works in this series are representational, and some are more abstract. What was your thought process when deciding what you wanted to be most, or least, legible for the viewer?
FB: When I first looked at the photographs that the three Paisaje Tabasco paintings and El Nopal are based on, I thought they were so plain and un-monumental. Very low contrast, not even nostalgic, just vernacular photographs. Considering abstraction, something a mentor and professor of mine, Darcy Huebler, would instill in me is this idea of rendering only to the point of recognition—to be expedient with your mark making in the process of visual communication. This is something I have internalized in my practice over the years, and it lets me register the details that stand out to me while allowing each painting to become its own picture.
FB: Looking at them longer, I see tire tracks, a windmill, cattle, and all these palm trees—Tabasco lines the Gulf of Mexico. I preserved details that I knew would make the paintings less generic to the viewer, so there’s clues as to what kind of ranch it is, or where we might be geographically. In my materials I always list the document I reference, which provides context along with a curatorial framework, like this exhibition’s. I don’t wish to conceal information from the viewer by abstracting in my paintings. I want to strike a balance between the facts and experience of each picture with what each viewer brings into it.
FB: There’s certain historical documents that I wanted to be more honest or accurate about, like the letter by Thomas Jefferson in A literary pursuit, and the two maps. There’s a kind of gradient of fidelity to the original image in this body of work. With my family photographs I felt a little more at liberty to dissolve certain details, or to editorialize.
KR: Especially in Paisaje Tabasco 3, the abstraction of the palm trees really works to make the piece feel like a visual representation of a memory. Like when someone is telling you a story and you’re trying to form your own image, but you weren’t there. And I feel like that’s really coming out in these paintings, this sort of melty, distant-memory feeling.
FB: I love that interpretation. So many landscape painters worked plein-air, from small studies, and in many ways invented their pictures. I’m working from photographs of a place I have never been to.
KR: Right, the landscape is right in front of them, and even still they’re editing as they go. I think there’s this idea that painters who worked en plein-air were recording when really they were interpreting. Going back to the familial connection, in many ways you’re not actually separated from these locations by that many degrees. There’s something to be said about genetic memory, too.
FB: I wonder if the application of paint also contributes to that distant-memory feeling. The same expedience that I had with the graphite or the color pencil pictures I also applied to these paintings. For this series, I worked mostly wet-on-wet, with pretty thinly applied paint. I’m not overworking the surface, rather saying what needs to be said and moving forward.
I wanted to push myself to work within the limitation of deciding to do all oil paintings. I love the medium, how you can spend so many focused hours on it. It’s a way of connecting with the images, of zooming in and getting really familiar with the materials.
KR: Yeah, it becomes very intimate. And photographs can be such emotional objects.
FB: Apart from the experience of the surface of a painting–the colors or things that one can aesthetically enjoy–you’re also taking in the symbols or the things that are readable from a painting before you have any other context. French literary theorist Roland Barthes thought about the experience of an image through the model of “punctum” and “studium”: what is generally understood about an image and what emotionally pierces the viewer in it. While working on this series, I also returned to the works of artists like Gerhard Richter, who translated photographs into paintings to question memory and history. So I really like that experience of remediating photographs into paintings, creating symbols out of them, and seeing what that produces.
The family aspect is a vulnerable one to share, and a lot of those people, the subjects of the work, are no longer here. It feels like a way to protect the original material by abstracting it, creating a bit of distance from the personal while allowing it to be present.
KR: Were you able to talk to any family who could share more context or who had closer memory to those places or people?
FB: I had mostly oral narratives of my dad’s upbringing in Tabasco. He casually showed me these images and I had mostly imagined these places before then. But I realized, going through family documents, that some relatives I had known to be in Tabasco were European, then moved to the US, and decided to settle in Mexico where they enjoyed many privileges, including land ownership. It’s such a great irony. The relative who is buried in East Los Angeles and his father especially, moved freely between Sonora and Los Angeles. Having both European and indigenous ancestry, I wanted to further unravel those histories.
When I look back at my own family and culture, movement is a constant. At different points in time, one can move with privilege or without it. Thinking about journeying and mapping in LA, I was also examining my own feeling of belonging and distance, and the surprise of finding that I have familial roots in the city. There’s a historical context that I’m stepping into that does implicate and involve me. On a personal level, I think I wanted to learn about my own desire for Los Angeles. We are often asked to justify and explain these decisions.
KR: This makes me think about the “myth” part of your title, Myth of Origin, as you’re trying to uncover your own, and balance what you thought to be true with new knowledge. After all of this research, what do you consider to be your origin?
FB: Mythology is so powerful, and the concept of origin is often constructed. There’s stories we tell to justify why things are the way that they are, that’s how I think of a “myth of origin.” Through this series, I show how origin is composed: through narratives, national interests, historical records and lack thereof, and sometimes, powerful pictures.
Origin can be instrumentalized. It can be obscured, for example by terms like Latinidad, which collapse difference. When conflated with belonging, I think it takes away one’s freedom to choose the shape of their life and trajectory.
I’m Mexican, which is a huge part of my identity, and I have found community all over the world. I identify with movement and others’ experience of it. No one chooses where they were born or what family they were born into, but I think it’s very important to make the effort to know and uncover that history. To identify the elisions and larger context. It can guide you, working like an inner compass to produce important questions.
As one grows and develops a political consciousness and their own experience of their identity, there are also chosen legacies that we hold onto. So origin is one part of the story. For me, it is a combination of my cultural roots in Mexico, lived experiences, and my chosen solidarities and intellectual histories.
Fía Benitez is a 2022 REEF Artist-in-Residence and a 2020 Research & Practice Fellow, with recent exhibitions, readings, and panels at Bozo Mag, Printed Matter, Ehrlich Steinberg, Heavy Manners Library, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, The Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles, The Reef, Tin Flats, and Other Places Art Fair. Their work has received support from Center for Cultural Innovation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, California Arts Council, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Fía has edited The Vassar Review, Sublevel Magazine, and Studio Magazine at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work is published by 4N Magazine, The Big One, Baest Journal, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and The Kitchen Blog. Fía holds degrees from Vassar College and CalArts.