Ocultismo y barro

Ocultismo y barro

Daniel Barragán, Karla Ekatherine Canseco, Dolores Furtado, Rodrigo Angel Jimenez-Ortega, André Magaña, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre, Tamen Pérez, Adrian Edgard Rivera

February 4–April 3, 2022

Hours: Thurs–Sun, 12–6pm and by appointment

Ocultismo y barro presents artworks made with or about clay that embody the medium’s mystical qualities. The title invokes occultism, the broadest sense of supernatural beliefs and spiritual practices, which contrast the scope of science and religion imposed on the Caribbean and Latin America through western imperialism. The artists in the exhibition speak to both the mysticism involved in transforming clay into art and the rendering of ancestral influences across the Americas, often in dialogue with the contemporary mythology of pop cultural iconography.

Barro has been used as a material in Latin America and the Caribbean for over 10,000 years to incarnate spirituality.Through effigies, ceremonial vessels, utilitarian objects, and dwellings, it has persisted as a material known for its malleability, durability, and availability. However, its cultural value has been largely contested. Clay objects from Latin America and the Caribbean have been disregarded in the art sphere as archeological relics that are often only discussed ethnographically. Occultism, as a lens, has additionally been dismissed by many critics for its emphasis on the power of the individual. However, understanding the fuerza of these artists’ works—personal, material, and mystical—through occultism, underscores their spiritual potential and disrupts cyclical deprecations of clay into craft or artifact.

Andrés Monzón-Aguirre, Tamen Pérez, and Daniel Barragán’s practices animate the inherited forms of vessels with restored energy, queering the static nature in which we encounter these traditional forms in the present. Barragán’s hybrid collages such as Water Jug 02 cross objects and eras—from traditional ancient pottery shapes to 70s and 80s rock and pop culture ephemera—drawing parallels of idolatry and vitality. Implicating the colonial violence of western structures, Pérez’ paintings reinstill the internal verve of ceramic objects lost to the vitrines of museology by anthropomorphizing their disposition in works such as Reclining Monkey-form Jar.... Similarly, Monzón-Aguirre, who is based between Brooklyn and Medellín, envelopes replicas of Tumaco-La Tolita objects in their Veiled Alcarraza series to allude to the opaque expressions of that which is subcultural and deviant under traditional frameworks, through gestures of queer, occult care and protection.

Rodrigo Angel Jimenez-Ortega, André Magaña, and Adrian Edgard Rivera parallel historical forms with present-day pop culture iconography to draw connections between devotions. In his work Dogs and Nintendo Switch, Jimenez-Ortega fuses pre-Colombian imagery with fictional characters from popular media, considering video games as forms of occult spirituality for US youth. Rivera’s Goku-Ehecatl parallels a basalt sculpture representing the Aztec god Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl with a 3D-printed copy of a bootleg Dragon Ball Z toy, questioning if transformation mimicking traditional craft is able to fully engulf this foreign media into the local cultural canon through two hero-myth journeys. In his series of jarrones, large vases, Magaña uses digital fabrication tools to render recognizable consumables, such as cazuelas and liter bottles, with imagery inspired by Colima Ceramics to spawn spirituality with the very hyper-capitalist tools designed to eliminate it.

Karla Ekatherine Canseco and Dolores Furtado emphasize the alchemical properties of clay in their work, which harnesses energy as a form of healing. Inspired by ancestral Mexican cultures that would involve clay effigies and vessels in sacred elements and processes, Canseco uses ceramics as performative tools. Bearing witness to the mystical symbols—such as the number 8, infinity, and crowns—that emerge in working with clay and across media, Furtado’s recent works—with titles such as Power, Templo, and Magic—explore the relationship between matter and spirit, creating talismans for new worlds.

The artists in Ocultismo y barro reanimate the material with mystical qualities of clay to breathe life into new possibilities with humor and healing, care and conviction. They join an international discourse of artists—from Ai Weiwei to Roberto Lugo—utilizing clay in anti-imperialist gestures that bridge cultural clashes; together, the works in this exhibition underscore how these themes persist amongst a new generation of Latine makers. By engaging the rhetoric of pop culture, many of these folkloric manifestations of ancestral Latine cultures refute capitalism, the spirit of the modern world whose way of understanding life, reason, and purpose obstructs the mysticism at the heart of the works in the exhibition.