Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her film Retiro (2019), Natalia Lassalle-Morillo considers how women pass down memories to their kin as they age. A film within a film, the three-channel portrait combines the scripted film she and her mother made together, behind-the-scenes shots of that film’s production, and interviews with her mother on gendered familial expectations and aging in Puerto Rico. Lassalle-Morillo’s meta approach to story-telling unpacks her relationship to her mother, demonstrating how maternal trauma, history, and myth are made and inherited through disjointed narratives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La Ruta by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through untouched natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico. The Panoramic Route was designed for residents and tourists to connect with the traditional center of the island, as part of a political agenda to modernize the country through infrastructure and social programs. Today, the highway is notorious for dismal road conditions, resulting in isolation between more densely populated metropolitan areas and contributing to a loss of cultural sites and practices that once took place along the Route.

Installation (Installation)

Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change. Be Oblivion, in Disconnect (2011) is a sculpture and an intervention. Two cardboard boxes house white neon letters that collectively have the potential to spell “Be Oblivion.” The dismembered phrase is rendered powerless in its present state; the potential power lies with the viewer, who could conceivably reconstruct it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Apparently Djurberg’s mother made a puppet theater and traveled around Göteborg performing during her childhood. This short story of a young man initially listening to birdsong in a city, suddenly confronted to warfare and wounded, could visually resemble child’s doll game or mise en scène, with a high dose of cynicism and violence. The figure, Hans, is attended to by two nurses whose raw discussion appears in speech bubbles: “we’ll have to amputate”.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

font VII by Catalina Ouyang is part of an ongoing series of ‘fonts’, or sculptures, inspired by Catholic holy water vessels. This particular iteration from the series combines hand-carved soapstone, a stop loss trap, horse hair, fermented egg, and other elements to create an artwork that defies categorization. The work’s most notable feature is a small cavity that cradles a naked egg—a translucent, flaccid egg without its outer shell.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive. The original photographs were taken by anonymous photographers, not as art but as documents of the building of the Panama Canal. The laborers in the images are holding cans of kerosene and spraying it into the foliage.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013).

Painting (Painting)

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s recent drawing of cutout figures on architectural tracing paper takes a statement by Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo, as a point of departure for the work. Stating, “migration problems can and should find their solution within the affirmation of ‘freedom of movement’ as the new inalienable right of humans. No human has chosen or chooses the place where they were born.

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.