LOS ANGELES — It was 65 levels and sunny the day I visited Earthshaker, an exhibition of labor by Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Workers staged throughout two rooms at Del Vaz Initiatives. Between the doorway and the gallery door is a courtyard with a terracotta fountain, a mass of night-blooming jasmine, and a bowed lemon tree. Encountering Workers’s hallucinatory five-channel video set up in any context could be a jarring expertise. However stepping from the sun-filled patio right into a small darkish room thrumming with the sound of rotary propellers and strobing with fluorescent lights, flickering texts, and vertiginous coloured discs precipitates a dislocation of one other order. To start out, your eyes, unable to regulate to the sudden darkness or the bursts of acrid mild, go quickly blind. Then, together with the movie taking part in throughout 5 holographic LED followers, is an array of ocular disturbances: coruscating spots, sparks {of electrical} cost, a constructing sensation of strain. The lights appear to course by way of you, leaving visible scars of their stead.
Workers’s video “In Ektase” (2023) shows a poem proven phrase by phrase, line by line, recurrently interrupted by flashes of radioactive pink and line drawings of exploding sunbeams. Disjunctive phrases like “descend slowly deeper into hell/ w/ velocity” and “the weight of reality, like tragedy/gravity, inevitably” are adopted by the repetition of the phrases “I AM ALIVE/ YOU ARE DEAD.” After 5 minutes, the blades cease rotating, and the lights go up till the movie begins once more. On this new context, static followers that may in any other case be considered HVAC tools seem menacing, like weaponry — that is maybe the purpose. Equally to Workers’s different filmic works, the set up is meant to have an effect on a dysphoric, dissociated state harking back to the one queer and trans our bodies are recurrently subjected to by social methods of violence and oppression.
Set up view of Earthshaker: Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Workers (2025), that includes work by Ana Mendieta
A spectral afterimage hovers above the 4 pictures by Mendieta on the adjoining wall. Just like the glow, the photographs from her Siluetas (1973–80) sequence visualize the presence of absence. In “Untitled: Silueta Series” (1978), a flowering vine adumbrates a hardly perceptible silhouette in opposition to a tree trunk, and in “Untitled: Silueta Series” (c. 1980), igneous rock cradles a recessed determine lined in a bioluminescent moss. Within the second room, the disembodied physique is animated on Tremendous 8 mm movie in “Untitled (Silueta Series)” (1978). In the course of the three-minute video, a silhouette limned in white gunpowder burns to ash as a wreath of smoke carries the determine away into the environment.
There are not any burn scars or plumes of smoke within the 5 assemblage work by Jarman featured within the presentation, solely proof of warmth’s alchemical properties. The canvases are primed with lead, gilded, and lined over in thick layers of tar and black oil paint. Jarmen organized the varied discovered objects — prayer books, driftwood, nails, cartridge instances, wedding ceremony bands, and sheets of shattered glass — atop the viscous substrate whereas it was nonetheless effervescent, completely affixing them to the floor because it dried. The burnished black rectangles resemble voids into which the detritus of this world has been solid. Or maybe they’re portals unto one other world altogether, the place the objects are freed from the resonances they bear right here, like prosecution, ache, or disgrace.
Audre Lorde as soon as referenced planarians, the small, self-generating animal species that sends out {an electrical} cost within the form of their severed or broken limbs, as a part of her summons to examine the longer term we want to inhabit. The artists in Earthshaker, too, draw our consideration to the unfavorable area. They ask us to acknowledge loss and to reckon with the hurt that’s been accomplished — but additionally to see the innumerable potentialities of altering the form completely.
Set up view of Earthshaker: Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Workers that includes work by Derek Jarman
Set up view of Earthshaker: Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Workers that includes work by P. Workers
Earthshaker: Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Workers continues at Del Vaz Initiatives (259 nineteenth Road, Santa Monica, California) by way of April 18.
