Groundwork

The artists, who span generations and territories across the United States, include: Sydney Acosta, Teresa Baker, Moira Bateman, Liz Ensz, Hannah Lee Hall, Alexa Horochowski, Kahlil Robert Irving, Seitu Jones, Stephanie Lindquist, Gudrun Lock, SaraNoa Mark, Ana Mendieta, Alva Mooses, Ryan Gerard Nelson, Nikki Praus, Ian Tweedy, and Mathew Zefeldt. 

A wellspring of enlivening nutrients, a signifier of territory and identity and a site of conflict over indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. From a material standpoint, earth immediately invokes the monumental Land Art tradition of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer, however, the artists in Groundwork eschew the romanticized grandeur of ‘empty’ Western spaces in favor of considered excavations of locally embedded and lived histories. Adopting anticolonial, queer, feminist, environmentalist, and other critical lenses, they seek communion with the specificities and spiritual meanings of place, burrow into the legacies and experiences of their ancestors, and express concerns about our collective future. Their poetic interventions into land center diasporic experiences, treat the ground as a repository of ancestral time and memory, and lament the historically entwined damage wrought by colonialism and resource extraction. More attuned with the groundbreaking work of Ana Mendieta, whose film Untitled: Silueta Series (Gunpowder Works) (1980) is included in the exhibition, earth is treated in Groundwork as an invaluable storehouse of oft overlooked heritages.  

Mendieta wrote, “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.” In the artist’s Silueta series, Medieta inscribed her body in the ground, producing ephemeral, earthbody sculptures resembling pre-Colombian forms. In the Gunpowder Works, a figure is burned into the soil as plumes of smoke swirl above it, producing a powerful feminine energy through a ritualistic act that fuses the body with the land. The series’ poignancy is also marked by the artist’s status as a Cuban exile, traumatically separated from her family at twelve-years-old as part of Operation Peter Pan (1961). Embedded in Mendieta’s oeuvre is a deep longing for her homeland and communion with her ancestral roots.  

Artists Conversation

July 28th at 5:30pm

Dreamsong is pleased to present a conversation between Liz Ensz, Stephanie Lindquist, and Ryan Gerald Nelson, three artists included in the current exhibition 

Liz Ensz’s topographical weaving in the exhibition references Bdote, the sacred land at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers and emphasizes the glitches of Google Map’s global surveillance project. Ryan Gerald Nelson took the exhibition opportunity to honor his Mdewakanton Dakota ancestors while spending time in Bdote, considered by the Dakota people to be to be the center of the Earth (Maka Cokiya Kin). In 1862, this sacred site was used as a concentration camp for Dakota people, including Nelson's greatgrandfather. Walking through this land, the artist took photos and collected fallen branches and broken roots which became tools and materials for a new painting. Stephanie Lindquist’s works depict scenes from local community farms in soil collected on site, which she painted over ethereal cyanotypes. In each of these projects, the indelible connection between our modern built environment and its raw material is made explicit, our vast inscription upon the earth metaphorized by materially innovative strategies that seek to collapse the boundaries between history, place, and representation.

For more information, check out the Dreamsong website here.

Gallery Hours

Wed-Sat 12-5pm