ALBUQUERQUE — The place is the artist’s voice within the museum? This query, posed throughout an artist roundtable on opening weekend of the exhibition Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue, is answered partly by the exhibition itself.
For the previous 10 years, Damaged Containers Podcast has been transmitting concepts between artists due to its creator, Ginger Dunnill, who additionally co-curated Damaged Containers. The present options large-scale artworks, installations, movies, and performances by 23 artists — a lot of whom are pals with one another and with Dunnill. All have contributed to the podcast, which covers matters reminiscent of psychological and bodily well being, Indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, migration, and navigating the industrial artwork market. Directional audio system positioned all through the exhibition area play excerpts of podcast episodes, creating an ambient soundtrack for the present; guests can pay attention whereas in proximity to works by the artists whose voices they’re listening to.
Set up view of the work of Autumn Chacon in Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue on the Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico
A kind of voices is that of Autumn Chacon, a Diné and Chicana sound artist and activist. Her set up, “Between Our Mother’s Voice and Our Father’s Ear” (2016), is a durational, unlicensed radio broadcast that includes sounds from the exhibition combined with area recordings and excerpts from the Damaged Containers Podcast. Chacon, who makes use of sound artwork as a type of resistance, turned her focus to breaking down possession and compelled laws after working in licensed broadcasting. In Damaged Containers, a few of her concepts concerning the energy of occupying airwaves — for instance, the truth that speech is a vibration that can not be undone — are made seen by a feather microphone with its cable operating the size of a central gallery wall in a wave sample.
Sound as a catalyst for private and collective transformation makes an look in different works as effectively, together with Marie Watt’s grouping of tangible, touchable jingle clouds, and Guadalupe Maravilla’s combined media sculpture “Disease Thrower #17” (2021), set towards the backdrop of the artist’s “Tripa Chuca (mural)” (2024). The set up includes three towering figurative steel rod sculptures with hexagonal higher and decrease parts that body gongs, accented with fibrous supplies like wooden, cotton, and loofah. Maravilla’s observe, rooted in activism and therapeutic, is knowledgeable by his experiences with stage III colon most cancers and references his experiences migrating from El Salvador to the US as a baby due to the Salvadoran Civil Warfare. The artist ritually retraced that route, gathering objects that he integrated into “Disease Thrower #17,” which he prompts as therapeutic portals throughout sound tub ceremonies.
Guadalupe Maravilla, “Disease Thrower #17” (2021), gong, metal, wooden, cotton, glue mitxutre, plastc, loofah, and objects collected from a trial of retracing the artists;s unique migration route; “Tripa Chuca (mural)” (2024), paint, everlasting marker, cosical collaboration (with Guadalupe Atayde)
Extra websites of vocalized or in any other case audible transformation are current in Black Belt Eagle Scout’s music movies “Spaces” (2023) and “My Blood Runs Through this Land” (2023), and Pleasure Harjo’s quick movie “A Map to the Next World” (2023). The generative potential of connection to the land and materials adjustments are evident in Christine Sandoval’s “Ignition Pattern” drawings, created from fireplace, water, soot, and fiber, and in Ryan Dennis’s Ma’s Home (2020), for which the artist reworked his household dwelling right into a communal artwork area.
Since seeing the present, I’ve been considering particularly about two works. In “Original Fragment of the Lost Girls Treasure Map” (2024), Amaryllis R. Flowers depicts a sugary candy, pastel-colored topographical map replete with mountains, fields, and streams, populated with processions of disembodied legs and high-heeled toes making their means by way of glittered puffy paint, gems, and different craft supplies. Good Woman Swamps, a murky physique of water only a stone’s throw from Habits Islands, lies sandwiched between the Astral Aircraft and Shadowlands, and surrounded by Unchartered Waters, Fringes of (Internal) Hell, Princess Portal, and Basis of Proof. I listened to the projected recording of Flowers talk about the connection between fantasy and trauma in her work, and describe a time in her life when artwork was now not her anchor however quite her terror. She had endured a psychotic break induced by, amongst different issues, graduating from Yale and the mounting pressures and turbulence of being a “successful” artist following her commencement from Yale’s distinguished MFA program. “Acts of imagination under unbearable living conditions help us to evolve,” she says.
Amaryllis R. Flowers, “Original Fragment of the Lost Girls Treasure Map” (2024), craft supplies, paper embossment, airbrush, acrylic, watercolor, bones, and gems on paper
Transgender artist Cassils alludes to such situations of their work, “The Resilience of the 20%” (2016), as effectively. The title factors to a rise of 20% within the homicide charge of trans folks worldwide in 2012 from earlier years. Put in in Damaged Containers is an almost two ton bronze solid of the clay slab that the artist, who incorporates bodybuilding into their observe, bashed throughout their efficiency “Becoming an Image” (not a part of the present).
Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue amplifies artists’ voices in methods which can be at odds with the narratives propagated by a lot of the mainstream artwork world. Right here, artists share tales about their lives and experiences as a substitute of relying solely on institutional didactics to “explain” what their work is about; they ask for assist and encourage others to do the identical; they have interaction in sluggish wanting and listening; they push again, create change, and break away. They do certainly converse fact to energy. Actions like these and initiatives like Damaged Containers are important, and never simply in a time when our constitutional rights and elementary freedoms are on the chopping block. Phrases have energy, and there’s nonetheless a lot extra to say.
Set up view of the work of Cassils in Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue 
Set up view of the work of Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger in Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue 
Set up view of the work of Marie Watt (entrance) and Christine Sandoval (rear) in Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue 
Set up view of the work of Tanya Aguiñiga in Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue 
Set up view of the work of Cannupa Hanska Luger in Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue
Damaged Containers: A Decade of Artwork, Motion, and Dialogue continues on the Albuquerque Museum (2000 Mountain Highway Northwest, Albuquerque, New Mexico) by way of March 2, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez.
