Triggered: Anthony Lepore
Spill © Anthony Lepore
Much of my childhood was spent in a sewing factory in East Los Angeles. From my toddler to early teenage years, I played between rows of machines and among bolts of fluorescent swimwear fabric. The company that occupied the factory was started in 1971 by my grandfather, an Italian immigrant, who cut his teeth sewing in factories in New York and New Jersey before coming west with the dream of starting his own business.
As a child, while my father moved bins around the factory and crunched diminishing numbers, I spent my time with an amazing group of Latina women who worked in the factory, many of whom are still connected to the space in some way. To me and to other kids who passed through the factory, they were caretakers, mothers, and grandmothers; it is from these women that I developed an early understanding of inclusion and community, values of which have deeply anchored my life as a queer person. When my family’s business closed, these same women established their own sewing business in the factory. I maintain a freestanding studio in the middle of the space.
After making art for some years in this studio, I turned to the factory as the subject for a body of work called Bikini Factory, first shown in Los Angeles in 2015. One evening, while mopping the floor in front of a striped-spandex still-life I was working on, a mirage materialized in the water. What looked like a Photoshop manipulation was in fact an analog illusion reflected in the puddle. I spent the warm summer evening photographing the reflection until the mop-water evaporated. This apparition seemed to embody the dissonance between the myth of the bikini and the labor required to manufacture that myth.
To view more of Anthony Lepore’s works, visit his website
