Aaron Elvis Jupin

“You look at a picture of a wildfire and they all look the same,” Jupin tells me over Zoom, as we discuss the painting, titled A Tissue for Your Issue, 2021. For him, environmental collapse moves through a singular visual language—the way every city looks the same underwater and sidewalks cave at one speed.

I spoke to Jupin for the first time in the middle of January, just after the opening weekend of ‘Layman’s Terms, Tongue Tied,’ his exhibition of ink drawings and airbrushed paintings at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles. Though his art has been displayed at solo gallery exhibitions in New York and Finland, the weekend marked his first-ever solo exhibition in the city he calls home.

My ears perk up as Jupin tells me about Fairy Land, one of many river washes in the suburb-presenting city of Fullerton, California, where he was born and raised. Christened by local teenagers who graffitied the name across its walls, Fairy Land was both a gathering space and a path to other gathering spaces. As a kid, Jupin would convene with friends after school to explore these narrow channels, which were built across Fullerton to manage water overflow from floods. He soon learned how to walk along them to get to his friends’ houses, composing an alternative map of his neighborhood, not from scenic routes or skilled shortcuts, but rather the ordinary magic of boredom.

Jupin’s work quietly unspools the fictions of suburbia—what he calls a “cartoon reality” of idealism and Fairy Lands. He describes Disneyland, Hollywood, and Knotts Berry Farm (a local theme park) as sites of roleplaying and false truths, symbolizing “the city acting like everything is fine” despite ongoing conditions of ecological precarity. “A sinkhole can open up in suburbia and eat the street. These things do happen,” he says. “Man has manipulated nature, in a way, to function for him. But it’s not gonna work forever. And that’s what interests me.”

<Read the full essay from Issue Four>