Leah DeVun
Women & Their Work, Austin
Through July 15, 2010

By Chelsea Weathers

Leah DeVun, Sinister Wisdom, 2010, Chromira Photograph, 40 x 30 inches. Photo courtesy of Leah DeVun and Women & Their Work.

In one respect, Leah DeVun’s current show at Women and Their Work is an exercise in interpreting an archive. Using a collection of lesbian/feminist/separatist publications, most of which were published during the 1970s (some are on display in the show in a vitrine along one wall), DeVun approaches her source material using three discreet media, each to different effects. On one wall is a group of three lightboxes, two depicting candid re-enactments of protest. Both images retain a sort of mimeographed quality, which hearkens back to the low-tech printing that is typical of these vintage publications. Hung above these two boxes is a round lightbox, which contains only the face of a full moon. The motif of the moon returns in one of DeVun’s strongest photographs, Early Morning Goodbye (all works 2010), in which a group of women, their backs to the camera and their silhouettes in dusky shadow, raise their arms in a salute to the moon.

Early Morning Goodbye is part of a series of photographs that line two other walls of the gallery. About half of the photos are portraits that take their titles and inspiration from the vintage publications––Lesbian Land, Up From Below, Sinister Wisdom. Most of photographs that appear in the original publications are candid; the women, often nude, have been photographed spontaneously as they engage with one another or in an activity outside the frame. DeVun, on the other hand, carefully composed each of her portraits in collaboration with her sitters, and as a result the images are much more confrontational. In most of these images, the subjects face the viewer head-on in a rather deadpan manner. Their bodies take up most of the frame, their nudity and steady gaze demanding attention in the starkly hung show. With these photographs, DeVun seeks to explore how recreating scenarios in which contemporary women inhabit the bodies and ethos of the earlier feminists might also recreate feelings of liberation or feminism within her sitters and how these feelings might also transfer to a contemporary audience.

DeVun’s portraits may use the vintage photos as inspiration, but ultimately her work is about the present rather than the past. The artist recently traveled to lesbian separatist intentional communities in northern Mississippi, and other photographs in the show document the landscape there. These are scenes of everyday domestic life, such as a steaming plate of eggs and grits in a breakfast nook, or a small yurt in a wooded clearing. DeVun’s impressions of these societies––their communality but also the isolation that goes hand-in-hand with separatism––were the impetus for the third element of the exhibition. In the middle of the gallery space stands a ramshackle shed, meant to be built up by viewers, the hammers, nails, and wooden planks laid out beside the structure. Here, DeVun forsakes subtlety in order to convey clearly and deliberately that the tactics of confrontation, protest, and community building are still valid techniques for liberation.

When taken together, the portraits and the scenes of separatist domestic life create what appears at first to be the slick documentation of a single community. Given that many of the subjects of these photos are recognizable members of Austin’s young female academic, activist, or lesbian communities, some viewers will recognize the fanciful nature of this imagined community, while others may take the construction at face value. This is where DeVun’s aestheticization of the cheaply produced periodical images becomes transcendent and not merely heavy-handed. The beauty of the photographs gives us as viewers a chance to imagine the people around us escaping the male-dominated capitalist system for a moment and inhabiting an ideal––and this effect is nothing less than liberating.

Chelsea Weathers is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation is a history of the exhibition and distribution of Andy Warhol's films in the 1960s.

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Sonny Smith
Okay Mountain, Austin
Through July 3, 2010

By Bridget Evarts

Sonny Smith, Installation view, 100 Records, 2010, Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Okay Mountain.

While other musicians have explored the alter-persona (John Lurie's lost blues legend Marvin Pontiac comes to mind), most have used it as a device to try out a new genre, preserve an identity separate from the music, or just rag a bit on the critics. Sony Smith’s 100 Records, an ambitious undertaking of 100 albums each by a different fictitious band, is different. At Okay Mountain, the albums play on a homemade jukebox, surrounded by renderings of the album covers and snippets of liner notes.

Creating the backstory and liner notes for 100 fictitious bands and singers would be ambitious enough, but Smith also wrote all the music, and in true jukebox format, he and guest musicians recorded both A and B sides for each 7” record. Personas such as Little Antoine and the Sparrows, Pierre Lafitte, the Loud Fast Fools and Merriweather Bradley populate the 200-song jukebox, and the styles range from R&B to Reagan-era punk, 60s British folk rock to country singer-songwriters. Smith later confided that his approach wasn't categorical; he didn't want a careful representation of musical genres, and thus there's the lone reggae artist Walter “The Goat” Riconda mixed in with the rest. Despite Smith's deference to his comfort zone, the songs manage to sound at once fresh and familiar.

Common themes weave together the backstories of the musicians in Smith's jukebox, the most prevalent being relative obscurity. There are some subtle references in the names and music as well. Damaged veteran Hazel Shepp is reminiscent of primitive musician Hasil Adkins. And is Carol Darger, Jackie Feather's fractious partner in music and love, perhaps a kissing cousin of outsider artist Henry Darger? The artwork also references the aesthetic of outsider art; the dominant style is a pastiche of handmade, lowbrow and contemporary folk art. Almost a hundred artists provided pieces for the project, including Chris Johanson, Ed Ruscha and William T. Wiley: while many artists were content to render two-dimensional jackets, some experimented in sculptural and digital design. The art definitely adds to the narrative, but none of it seems able to stand alone without the backstory and music.

If there is a critique in 100 Records, it may be a good-natured poke at the obsessive record collector's zeal for esoteric discoveries. Still, there is a romance in Smith's characters and their unrealized aspirations, and a sense of nostalgia for a time before MP3s and iTunes. Today, the adolescents in Wayward Youth would have a Myspace page, and the bigamist religious collective of Transients might easily reach internet fame via YouTube.

During a visit to Okay Mountain, I had the gallery to myself initially. I punched in my selections on the jukebox and wandered awhile through the art and anecdotes, at least until two other visitors showed up. They quickly dominated the jukebox, tapping through the songs rapidly, never allowing one to play through before interrupting it for the next selection. Just like a true jukebox, I suppose. You never get to hear all your songs all the way through.

Bridget Evarts is a writer based in Austin and member of the band Over the Hill.

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Sterling Allen
Inman Gallery Annex, Houston
Through June 26, 2010

By Katie Geha

Sterling Allen, Installation view, Full Court Press, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Art Palace.

Throughout Sterling Allen’s recent work exists a sense of absurdity that is inherent to the act of misrecognition; the feeling of waving to a friend only to find that the person is a stranger. This sensation first strikes when encountering a flimsy wooden pallet that sits upright in the center of the installation. White painted letters on the uppermost slat spell out “Lorem Ipsum Dolor.” What at first seems like a Latin phrase, a cue to hidden meaning fraught with visual and historical references, is actually a different kind of jargon: the gobbledygook used as placeholder text in the publishing industry. The nonsensical phrases bring attention to the style of lettering, not the meaning of the words. Here and throughout the installation, Allen taps into the meaningless not as a serious commentary on our current state of affairs, but rather as an exercise in apprehending or mis-apprehending the visual cues of our daily lives.

This mini-exhibition, part of a larger group show entitled Full Court Press at the Inman Annex in Houston, was created directly after Allen returned from a residency in Buenos Aires, and the syntax of the city is visible in the work. Throughout his stay, he wandered the streets of the city taking pictures of structures he encountered. The photographs of the bizarre objects, striped and often adorned in blue and yellow, the colors of the popular Boca Junior football team, were then translated into pristinely realized non-functional sculptures.

The works certainly recall Saussure’s logic of semiotics but to go into a deeper discussion of the language of signs might be academic and boring. And Allen’s work is anything but academic and boring. Even while referencing art world motifs such as minimalism and abstract patterning, this installation maintain a levity and playfulness. The stunning Untitled, for instance, a found sculpture made up of fourteen bottles of windshield wiper fluid placed on the floor flush against a mirror, certainly recalls Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacements and Donald Judd in its rigid arrangement, yet it retains a style that feels more like Allen’s than anyone else’s. The forms of the curved bottles, the bright-blue fluid, the black round caps all neatly lined up and doubled in the mirror creates a pleasing aesthetic just as it might reference clarity and cleanliness.

When approaching Allen’s works it might be impossible for us to understand whatever meaning these signs represent, yet the syntax of their arrangement taps into universal codes of sign-reading. We live in the world and are taught how to comprehend its shorthand. “Lorem Ipsum” uses nonsense as placeholder, yet in this exhibition nonsense takes on a slightly greater meaning. Through it, Allen causes us to question our ability to so quickly trust the everyday abstract signs we regularly encounter.

Katie Geha is pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Mexico City Now
A thriving art scene in Mexico City
2010

By Ursula Davila-Villa

An International Art Fair

Pedro Reyes, Installation view of puppets, babymarx, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and LABOR.

Every year, ZONA MACO, Mexico City’s contemporary art fair, gets bigger, and the list of exhibitions and events organized by the city’s museums, private collections and alternative spaces to coincide with the fair gets longer. ZONA MACO, a moderately sized international fair, has grown significantly over the past seven years. This is no small feat given that, when ZONA MACO was founded, Art Basel Miami had already established itself as the single most significant platform where North and South meet. In addition, ZONA MACO had a particular challenge in defining both the participating galleries and the attending audience, specially given Mexico City’s small collecting community. This task is still in process, and hopefully in the years to come we will see a more clearly defined personality for this still young art fair.

Despite these challenges, this year’s fair was particularly strong. One of the highlights was Gabriel Kuri’s large-scale embroidered rugs depicting sales receipts that hung on the walls of the Kurimanzutto (Mexico) booth. Part of his series that documented his purchases by collecting and replicating the receipts from his purchases, Kuri used the traditional craft of rug making to comment on capitalism and consumer culture.

Meanwhile, in the section ZONA MACO SUR, spaces devoted to individual artists, standouts included Adrian Villar Rojas and Johanna Calle. Ruth Benzacar Gallery (Argentina) featured Villar Rojas’ piece titled Quiero un mundo abstracto (2010), a display of color pencil and ink drawings rendered on the pages of several books (from novels to poetry manuscripts). His detailed drawings became windows into the artist’s imagination, depicting fantasy worlds as if illustrating scenes from a wicked children’s book. Casas Riegner Gallery (Colombia) featured a suit of fine and abstract drawings by Calle titled Contables 19 (2005). Her pencil drawings on yellow accounting paper use the line as to create webs with minimalist associations that transform paper normally used for dry office routines into an interwoven configuration of geometric and organic forms.

A Growing Community of Galleries

Every time I visit Mexico City it seems harder to keep up with the mushrooming art gallery scene. During this visit, I particularly liked a new space called LABOR, directed by Pamela Echeverria and located in the traditional gallery area Colonia Roma. LABOR featured an installation by Pedro Reyes entitled babymarx. The installation integrated, a display of historical figures such as Karl Marx, Joesph Stalin, Mao and Che Guevara sculped as Bunraku puppets, a series of monitors showing a puppet soap opera, and a scaled model of a library that served as the stage set to record the puppet show. Reyes’ script for the puppets is a satirical debate about socialism and capitalism. Although there are several art spaces in the same neighborhood, LABOR is definitely a great new addition to the already thriving gallery scene for two reasons: its library that is open to the public, and its voice that represents a new generation of gallery owners and young artists from Mexico and abroad.

Museums and Private Collections

Museums in Mexico City (which are supported by the state) have increasingly embraced contemporary art over the past two decades. Among the highlights was the contemporary art museum, Museo Tamayo. Even though the galleries of Museo Tamayo were closed for a remodeling project, the institution organized their annual gala, which included a performance by Los Super Elegantes. With new director Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy at its helm and an ambitious program, Museo Tamayo promises to become an important institution within both Latin America and the US.

Without a doubt the most significant private collections in Mexico City is that of Eugenio López Alonso, also known as Colección Jumex after his family company. Set in a compound next to a food-processing factory that produces Jumex juice, the collection includes work by U.S. artists such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois and Jasper Johns, alongside established and emerging Mexican artists such as Miguel Calderón, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Gabriel Kuri, and Diego Pérez. In conjuction with ZONA MACO, Jumex opened The Traveling Show and El Gabinete Blanco, two interesting and refreshing group exhibitions organized by Brazilian curator Adriana Pedrosa. The Traveling Show, as its name suggests, brought together work by artists from many different regions around the theme of traveling. Some works, such as Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla’s video Under Discussion (2005), took a political perspective on the idea, while others, such as Thiago Rocha-Pitta’s video of the sky between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in RJ x SP – aerial bridge in highway time or address-less love letter (2005), embodied the more romantic side of travel.

Additionally, El Gabinete Blanco was a delightful small and intimate exhibition that featured white art works by artists such as Julieta Aranda, Juan Araujo, Iran do Espíritu Santo, Dan Flavin, Clair Fontaine, among others. The installation, organized in a ninetieth century salon style, was delicate and precise. Contrary to the visual noise present throughout the bigger The Traveling Show, the mood of El Gabinete Blanco was soft and appealing. Mr. Pedrosa’s exhibitions were well-worth the two and a half hours of traffic we endured in order to arrive to the compound.

Experimental Project Space

I close this piece with one of the most exciting projects taking place in Mexico: SOMA, an artist run school and residency program founded and directed by artists Yoshua Okón and Eduardo Abaroa. Historically, artists in Mexico have played a decisive role in crafting the face of national culture and its relationship to society. SOMA is certainly carrying on this tradition. Okón and Abaroa founded the program in 2009 as an experimental project conceived to create an alternative platform to discuss the key issues pertaining to contemporary art production and culture. Their goal is to engage both young and establish artists in a new kind of art school based on a mentorship program, and to attract a general audience to interact with and question artists face-to-face, without mediation. SOMA offers short-term residencies for international artists, and hopes to enroll emerging artists from other parts of Mexico and abroad in their trimester program in the near future. In addition, they organize free public programs every Tuesday and host a variety of events in collaboration with other curators, scholars, and universities in Mexico. Back in the 1990s both Okón, who co-founded and directed La Panadería, and Abaroa, who founded and organized Temistocles 44 (T44), were key players in the growth of Mexico’s contemporary art world. Now, SOMA embodies the ideals of La Panadería and T44 by promoting critical discourse and educational projects for a new generation of artists.

Even though the press has not shed Mexico in the best light recently, the country’s artists and art institutions continue to engage in the public arena in an effort to build a stronger sense of community though shared artistic experiences. Many native artists and curators who were living abroad are returning to Mexico in an effort to strengthen the discourse and its relationship to the past in order to craft a better future. It is clear that the country is full of refreshing new voices that will continue to foster a thriving art scene that is both informed by national culture and politics and extremely relevant to the international art world.

Ursula Davila-Villa is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art.

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Psychedelic, Optical & Visionary Art since the 1960s
San Antonio Museum of Art
Through August 1, 2010

By Hills Snyder

As You Like It

Jose Alvarez, Star Garden, 2007, acrylic, watercolor, porcupine quills, crystals on watercolor paper, 59 x 40 inches. Collection of Sheila and Milton Fine, Pittsburgh, Pa. Courtesy San Antonio Museum of Art.

I go to restaurants and the groups always play Yesterday. I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us Yesterday. He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing I Am The Walrus.
– John Lennon

All tricksters like to hang around the doorway, that being one of the places where deep-change accidents occur.
– Lewis Hyde

The truest poetry is the most feigning.
– Shakespeare

Jose Alvarez has made the most of hanging around doorways and it doesn’t really matter if you catch him coming or going. His use of porcupine quills and crystals intentionally references Carlos Castaneda, about whom validity vs. authenticity has been argued, but in the end this doesn’t matter—you make your own authenticity out of whatever raw materials are available. I know for sure this is true—I think it’s why they call it art—because it’s made up. There is art, theatre if you will, involved in even the most genuine rituals and eventually you’ll understand why the jaguar skull on the Mesa faces you at first and then faces the opposite direction later. You’ll understand this, if, that is, you are willing.

O
The time has come to talk of many things.

1
I’d like to say that Alvarez’ 2007 painting, Star Garden, is “on view now” at the San Antonio Museum of Art, but it isn’t. That would be, perhaps, too much of a good thing, as the show already has lots to offer. The piece is among those works included in curator David Rubin’s original conception of Psychedelic, Optical and Visionary Art Since The 1960s, but it could not be brought to the museum due to financial limitations. Given those constraints, a decision was made to focus the contemporary branch of the show mainly on San Antonio artists, leaving the shipping budget for what Mr. Rubin calls the “pioneers”—artists like Alex Grey, who has become well known since the early seventies for leaving academia driven paradigms and engaging something more transcendental. Star Garden is in a Pittsburgh private collection, but maybe some intrepid Central Texas collector will step up and give the museum a new Alvarez piece. If they do, I promise to visit it often, as I have done with Frank Stella’s Double Scramble—a real touchstone, and the main reason I’ve visited SAMA for the last three decades.

O
By the way, you can stand on Michael Fried and argue that theatre vs. objecthood debate if you wish, but when I visit Double Scramble, I’m not looking at a picture, I’m going in.

1
Not that it isn’t flat or anything.

O
Anyway, for now, the full-page reproduction of Star Garden in the lavishly illustrated catalog will have to do. The painting has the look of what I can only call fairy dust wall paper—saccharine, seductive, hi-def—a soft-edged, split-fountain of turquoise, yellow, pink and purple, across which concentric orbs, cellular flowers, starbursts, morphing tubes of color and weird gargoyle-like finials hover, seeming to float and drift. The mottled tubes are rigid, hypnotized, simultaneously serpent and shehnai, while the gargoyles call to mind a lot of things—the creatures that at times bedevil Jim Woodring’s cartoon character Frank, Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of radiolarians and other life-forms, Wedgwood urns (SAMA has a gallery full of them), the 3D renderings of the Mandelbrot set known as Mandelbulbs, all things steampunk and of course Terence McKenna’s self-transforming machine elves which McKenna himself has compared to Fabergé eggs.

1
I’ve encountered these entities before—they seem to smirk a lot and have strangely modulated voices, not unlike the garbled transmissions from the future heard by James Cole in the Terry Gilliam film, Twelve Monkeys. Yet they speak without sound. I don’t know if they are significant. I think they function as red herrings mainly, just to see what you’ll fall for. On the other hand, I can’t say conclusively, and I’d like to know more. Once they whispered to me “if you want to get to pleasinoinktament you gotta go nootinoinkstowards.” I shit you not and I knew exactly what they meant. It was actually helpful information. I feel that perhaps they populate a border where travelers are likely to find that maps are of no use; that the whole notion of that kind of superimposed logic is extremely funny.

O
It’s interesting that when Alvarez uses these particular images they are often bilaterally symmetrical. This is a characteristic of sentience. On another level, twinning is the feature that most vividly characterizes the ladder-like structure of DNA (though one of the “uprights” is inverted). In Haeckel’s ornamental morphology, this doubling, one side mirroring the other, is called “organic stereometry” though he takes it further, to radial symmetry.

1
Check out the 1998 reprint of Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, first published over a century ago. A gorgeous book, you can put it on the shelf next to the catalog for the Psychedelic show. While you’re at it, open it to page 17 where you can see that the photograph of Constant Roux’s 1907 glass chandelier, based on Haeckel’s drawing of the Discomedusae (apparently created in a fever on a Saturday night), prefigures the Mandelbulb, which was not seen until at least eighty years later.

O
In addition to being a potter and an abolitionist, Josiah Wedgwood was Charles Darwin’s grandfather. He lived in a time when fossil collecting was a big deal, though many didn’t have a clue as to their actual origin. The notion of extinction of species was not widely accepted or even dreamt of. Many believed the earth was less than 6000 years old based on Bishop Usher’s calculations (foolish fundamentalists still believe this). Some collectors thought that fossils were gems buried in the earth by an external god just so people could dig them up and be delighted.

1
Thomas Jefferson came along a little later, in between Wedgwood and Darwin. He was an avid fossil collector and an early player in American paleontology. He was no literal interpreter of scripture, which he has referred to as including ignorance, absurdity, untruth, charlatanism and imposture.

O
Anyway, the point is, nature speaks louder than words. Or rather, it is The Word. Olaf Breidbach, in his introductory essay to the Haeckel reprint, refers to Haeckel’s project as a “phylogeny of the spirit.”

1
Redressing the concept of symmetry: it’s important to note that without asymmetry, life would not be possible. The cosmic mistake that allows the imbalance between matter and anti-matter certainly qualifies as a deep-change doorway.

O
Maybe that’s what they think is so fucking funny.

The elves I mean.

1
It’s only 625 miles from Novelty, Missouri to Hazard, Kentucky. You could easily drive it straight through, but no matter how close you get, the distance that’s left can always be halved, so you may never get there. Not only that, it can seem sometimes that you’re going in circles—didn’t we already go through Grayville? But you gotta do what you gotta do, doubt and determinism not withstanding, even if your car’s a clunker. It’s necessary for something, even if you don’t not know what.

O
And you can always take a cab, if you really have to.

1
Stochasm: a strange arroyo into which one may slip without notice. There’s one in Illinois, right outside Grayville. If you are drawn into one, you won’t know what’s in store, but adaptability helps to insure a favorable outcome.

O
Star Garden bears a remarkable resemblance to The Robe of Chemchuties, a subatomic raiment discovered by Voyager 2 on the eighth moon of Uranus in 1986, just a year before mandelbiulbs began to appear. Chemchuties is known to be connected with Matter Sophia, Pachamama, Isis, Gaia, Shakti, Shekinah and is a frequent cohort of Bill the lizard. It is said that she is the dragon referred to by Merlin in the John Boorman film, Excalibur.

1
Merlin: Shall I tell you what's out there?
Arthur: Yes, please.
Merlin: The dragon. A beast of such power that if you were to see it whole and complete in a single glance, it would burn you to cinders.
Arthur: Where is it?
Merlin: It is everywhere. It is everything. Its scales glisten in the bark of trees. Its roar is heard in the wind. And its forked tongue strikes like... [lightning strikes] Merlin: Like lightning—yes that's it.

O
And clanking through this panoply of forms comes the human—still in this century bound up with breastplate and helmet, sword and shield—all the apparatus necessary to protect itself.

From what, exactly?

1
As we’ve seen before, doubt and necessity are the parents of invention, but history is the cab driver of evolution. Beyond the opposed views of history, linear and cyclical, there must be a third option.

What exactly?

O

1
Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?

O
Exactly.

A companion piece to this article is forthcoming in Artlies online. Hills Snyder lives in San Antonio. More of his writing can be found at www.hillssnyder.com.

Houston, New York, San Antonio

By Claire Ruud, Erin Riley-Lopez, Wendy Atwell

Andy Coolquitt, we care about you, 2008, metal, wire, epoxy, lightbulb, plastic, yarn, 63 x 20 x 9 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley.

Houston
Hand + Made
Contemporary Arts Museum

Refreshingly, Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse Art and Craft breaks craft-based art practices free from the medium-based exhibition. Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver uses a shared predilection for performance to bring together artists working in all sorts of mediums associated with craft to great effect. Seeing works like Anne Wilson’s woven choreography/sculpture and videos of B Team’s glass blowing performances together makes so much sense it’s hard to imagine why more people haven’t already thought of it. In retrospect, craft—with its inescapable association with utility—and performance are an impossibly obvious pairing. These objects beg to be touched, worn, and played with. Performances and activities in conjunction with the exhibition may be found in CAMH’s calendar. –CR

New York
Andy Coolquitt
Lisa Cooley

Andy Coolquitt’s We Care About You (2008) beckons, if you will, from one of the Lower East Side gallery’s two storefront windows. The hanging, multi-colored sculpture pops from the surrounding white space and its single, glowing light bulb signals the viewer to step inside. There, the raw, open space of the gallery lends itself to this work made of industrial and found materials. Coolquitt refers to this works as “somebody mades” because “another human designed and constructed them,” a playful take on an art historical term of weighty proportions. Long, straight poles, assembled from lighters, plastic and metal in cotton-candy pinks, sunshine yellows and electric blues, criss-cross the space in a careful balancing act. Activated by the viewer who must dance around them, the sculptures gain an animated quality that objects of this sort might otherwise belie. –ERL

San Antonio
Cosmocto
Sala Diaz

Hills Snyder, the director of Sala Diaz, met David and Daniel Frank, the collaborative team Cosmocto, at an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru, and Sinchi Medicina, the title of the duo’s current show at the gallery, refers to the medicinal qualities of the hallucinogenic plant. Cosmocto’s interest in mystical sciences—cymatics, color healing, symbolic resonance and sacred geometry—is tricky within a cynicism-laced art world that runs on the potent fumes of irony. The artists’ challenges are legion, among them: how to express the radically transformative experiences of an hallucinogenic trip inside an art gallery without evoking the aesthetic of a New Age bookstore. Mostly, Cosmocto manages this challenge by sidestepping the critical discourse entirely. The installation, saturated by a rainbow palette of geometric forms, creates a ritualistic, ceremonial environment that provides a welcome relief from contemporary art’s ironic distance and commoditization. Here, color, form and composition are both a product of and testament to the artists' ongoing spiritual journeys. –WA

Claire Ruud is Associate Director of Fluent~Collaborative.

Erin Riley-Lopez is an independent curator based in New York City.

Wendy Atwell received her M.A. in Art History and Criticism from The University of Texas at San Antonio.

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