Emmanuel Sevilla was born and raised in Los Angeles where he earned his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Drawn to the dominating elements in the urban environment (signs, advertisement, consumer objects and detritus), he explores the economy of these things. Through a craft based practice that pulls from his experience as a commercial sign maker, he creates painting-sculpture hybrids utilizing a trompe l’oeil-like technique. Sevilla currently lives and works in San Francisco where he received his MFA from California College of the Arts and was a 2015 participant at Skowhegan’s School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine.
Discarded pieces of paper, empty containers, cardboard boxes, coffee sleeves – I find beauty in the simplest of things. I’m interested in the forgotten, the detritus in the urban environment. I develop a relationship with what I pick up, through the hours of labor, meticulous painting and recreation. It’s a conversation between me and the Funyun bag. I view trash as an anthropological form. The items I’m painting, soldering and assembling are like maps; maps that serve as blueprints of consumer society, teaching me how to make them. Trash is a form that has lost its function, like decrepit signs & blank billboards. The physical process of making becomes an opportunity to assume new roles, while maintaining traces of the objects history through appropriation. I paint the everyday, remnants of objects we come in contact with daily. This is a type of poetic gesture, transforming and transcending the insignificant. Words will always be insufficient. Making is my way of understanding the world around me.