MI TIERRA: Contemporary Artists Explore Space
The Denver Art Museum is featuring 13 Latino artists who are reviewing, challenging and highlighting contemporary life in the American West.
Mi tierra is a phrase meaning motherland or homeland, as well as the more prosaic soil and dirt that land is built upon. In the new exhibition at the Denver Art Museum of the same name, 13 Latino artists created site-specific installations that reflect on the idea of home and life in the American West.
From videos to textiles, sculptures to photographs, Mi Tierra is a truly innovative exhibit for the DAM that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art installations in a fun and provocative way. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a modern art lover, there’s bound to be something in the exhibition you’ll respond to.
Installation art is meant to surround the viewer in a way unique to the space it occupies, and the most successful of the installations in Mi Tierra use the gallery space and reference the DAM’s collections in a creative way. A definite stand-out piece is Justin Favela’s Fridalandia, a massive installation done entirely in paper mâché that recreates Frida Kahlo’s courtyard from the 2002 movie, Frida.
“When I watch that movie, all the symbols and objects that represent Frida are boiled down to this set of her courtyard in La Casa Sul,” Favela said. The Pre-Columbian artifacts that Frida collected also tie in nicely with the DAM’s collection of indigenous art from central Mexico, which Favela incorporated into the piece.
It took Favela and 12 assistants three weeks to create the piñata-style mural on the back wall (itself a recreation of a landscape by famous 19th-century Mexican painter José María Velasco), and another two and a half weeks with six assistants to make the courtyard interior. Fridalandia gave Favela not only the chance to reference two iconic Mexican artists, but to investigate them and their art as symbols of Mexican identity.
Another installation that uses the DAM’s unique gallery space to spectacular effect is Gabriel Dawe’s Plexus no. 36.
At first glance, Plexus looks like a rainbow stretching from the window and reflecting back on itself. In fact, this luminous piece is created with over 60 miles of string that Dawe wove together himself into a luminous work of art that seems almost incorporeal. Though breathtaking and worth viewing simply as an object of beauty all on its own, Dawe’s work also has a more thoughtful side. His use of textiles references traditional Mexican weaving while questioning gender roles and definitions of masculine and feminine in Latino culture.
Dawe isn’t the only artist who uses textiles in an interesting way. Daniela Edburg’s Uprooted turns organic elements like rocks, roots, lichen, and even tornados into soft, wool-spun, woven pieces of whimsy. These pieces are contrasted against family portraits and photographs that give the installation a gothic sensibility. Edburg said her goal with Uprooted was to look at the timeline of natural forms native to Colorado and compare that to human concepts of familial roots and “nativeness,” but the installation conveys this subtly. It feels more like an abandoned doll’s house than a head-on confrontation of ethnicity and nationality.
Some other pieces of note include Song of the Event Horizon by Claudio Dicochea, a collection of modern-day casta paintings that Dicochea created to “tell us who we are” in the same way medieval casta paintings described the complex racial hierarchy of post-conquest Latin America; and Destinies Manifest by John Jota Leaños, a video installation that reimagines John Gast’s infamous representation of Manifest Destiny, American Progress, from an indigenous perspective.
Throughout the exhibition Mi Tierra, Latino artists use the platform as an opportunity to reflect their own identity as people of Mexican descent, while moving in both personal and overtly political directions. There are themes of migration, labor, visibility, and violence; but there are also celebrations of Latino heritage, memory, and culture. The installations are diverse in tone, perspective, and narrative, and that multiplicity of voices and experiences within mi tierra is the entire point of the exhibit.
Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place will be up on the fourth floor of the DAM’s Hamilton Building until October 22, 2017. Entry is included with general admission. For more details, visit denverartmuseum.org.
