Roger Reyes: I See Them Run and Hide, Every Time
October 4, 2025 – January 11, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, October 4 from 7 – 10PM
Grand Central Art Center
125 N. Broadway
Santa Ana, CA 92701
I See Them Run and Hide, Every Time is a site-specific installation composed of three interrelated works that challenge the viewer’s assumptions about color, structure, and spatial orientation. Constructed with copper and steel piping, acrylic tubes, industrial scaffolding, mirrors, and carefully orchestrated lighting, each piece acts as both a physical and psychological map of the artist’s lived experience with colorblindness. Rather than presenting color as a static spectrum, Reyes renders it as fragmented, shifting, and elusive—more akin to refracted light than solid hue.
These installations are not passive objects to be viewed but environments to be navigated. As viewers move through and around the work, they encounter a distorted reality that echoes the artist’s own—one where the boundaries between object and space, light and surface, clarity and confusion are in constant flux.
At its core, I See Them Run and Hide, Every Time is an exploration of the emotional and perceptual terrain of colorblindness. The industrial aesthetic—featuring scaffolding, tubing, reflective materials, and cold metallic structures—becomes a visual language of both constraint and clarity. These utilitarian elements, often associated with construction and repair, speak to the act of reassembling and reinterpreting a world that does not present itself in full fidelity to the artist.
Reyes uses reflective surfaces and strategically fragmented lighting to mimic the unstable relationship he has with color and depth perception. The result is a visual and spatial dissonance that allows viewers to experience, however fleetingly, the mental recalibration required to navigate a visually inconsistent world.
By reconstructing his perception into a shared environment, Reyes doesn’t just represent his experience—he reclaims it. The installations serve as both personal narrative and broader commentary on the nature of difference, inviting reflection on how perception defines reality and how unseen conditions shape emotional and cognitive experience.
Ultimately, this exhibition transforms the gallery into a perceptual dialogue—between artist and viewer, seen and unseen, structure and sensation—compelling us to reconsider how we interpret the world around us and the people within it.
AABOUT THE ARTIST
Santa Ana artist Roger Reyes first garnered recognition through his work in mural painting and restoration. In recent years, and through his year-long artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center, he has turned inward, developing a deeply personal contemporary installation practice. His work explores the nature of perception—specifically, how it is shaped and limited by colorblindness. With this solo exhibition, Reyes expands on themes of sensory distortion, utilizing familiar tools and materials such as scaffolding, acrylic panels, mirrors, and industrial piping to create immersive environments. These elements are not merely structural—they become metaphors for fragmentation, disorientation, and the unseen complexities of navigating the world through a non-normative lens.
Reyes is co-founder of the Santa Ana Community Artista Coalition, a grassroots collaborative effort generating new mural projects throughout the community and responsible for the restoration of important public works, including Sergio O’Cadiz’s relief at Freemont Elementary School, La Raza murals in Artesia Pilar, and Emigdio Vazquez’s mural Chicano Gothic at Santa Ana’s Memorial Park in partnership with Mural Colors. His work has been exhibited at spaces including Giants Casting Shadows, Santa Ana College Gallery, Crear Studio, and Galleria of Imagination.
