L-Gallery
January 25 - April 20, 2024

Including work by 11 artists from Latin America, Presentiments takes the weather as a starting point to ask questions about how we inhabit the world and how we make sense of our landscapes: national, geographic, and emotional.

Donna Conlon (USA / Panama) • Josh T. Franco (USA) • Sofia de Grenade (Chile) • Jonathan Harker (USA / Panama) Hipólito Hernandez (USA) • Jessica Kairé (Guatemala / USA) • Jorge De León (Guatemala) • Asunción Molinos Gordo (Spain) • Ana Navas (Ecuador / The Netherlands) • Miguel Angel Ríos (Argentina / Mexico) • Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer (Guatemala) • Mario Santizo (Guatemala) • Melanie Smith (Mexico / England) • Adán Vallecillo (Honduras) Inés Verdugo (Guatemala)

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Presentiments begins with the question How is the weather? Colloquially, the question is a common way of opening conversation; it also can be a way of asking about affective relationships between people. Stormy weather, for example, might signal an interpersonal conflict; conversely, someone might be described as having a sunny personality. Co-curated by Laura Augusta and Adán Vallecillo, Presentiments uses the weather as a pretext to consider how artists and the natural world influence one another, developing extended conversations over years and across generations. In contrast to legacies of “importance” and heroism, Presentiments approaches the weather as a way of gauging—and centering—relationship in its broadest sense.

Many of the artists included in the exhibition live in the tropics of Central or South America. Relationships not only to weather but also to the other-than-human systems of the natural world offer a foundation for daily life and for creative practice among these artists. For example, mangoes falling on a tin roof in Tropical Zincphony by Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker indicate a season; the plunking sounds of the fruit offer a sonic landscape of abundance independent of human communication. Gabriel Rodriguez Pellecer uses his own body as a site for interacting with landscapes; in a photograph, we see his sunburned back aligned with the horizon of the sea, as if becoming one landscape. Inés Verdugo’s Deceso describes the experience of profound loss through a struggling journey to push a boat to the top of a mountain and then off a cliff. And Miguel Angel Ríos takes the visual image of the border wall and remakes it with thorns; the wall gradually kaleidoscopes into an agile, moving thing, dancing to the sounds of protest and police sirens.

In Presentiments, artists look to the natural world as they revisit artistic and political histories; in particular, traditions of Western Art History become touchstones to playfully interrogate, from the cultural landscapes of Latin(x) Americas. Jorge De León’s Studies of Light and Dark uses the tradition of chiaroscuro to think about masculinity and survival. Josh T. Franco’s contribution—a video of the artist dancing on the patio of painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s home—brings an embodied relationality to our understanding of the abstract painter’s legacy. Melanie Smith’s Xilitla Dismantled takes the Surrealist pleasure gardens of poet Edward James as a site for a dream-like 35mm film. Here, we see the fantastical architectures of James over-run by the rainforest, 40 years after his death. Jessica Kairé’s contribution cites an early feminist film by Martha Rosler (Semiotics of the Kitchen) as a visual reference, interpreted from the context of “security” in Guatemala City. Mario Santizo’s El sol es un martillo takes the visual culture of midcentury popular films—Carmen Miranda and her tropical fruit—to wryly resist the tropical stereotypes embedded in such imagery.

A presentiment is a feeling, a sense of what is coming. Honoring traditional barometric methods of forecasting the weather (as described in Asunción Molinos Gordos’ video Barruntaremos), the presentiments at play here honor intuition and relationship as the signals for predicting what is to come. Ana Navas, in a video matrushka of fruit within fruit within fruit, teases our predictive capacity. And Sofia de Grenade, in a photograph of eucalyptus trees marked with light-reflecting tapes, destabilizes our sense of who is doing the looking. At a time when climate change and its profound impacts upon planetary life are often simplified within the destructive binaries of political discourse, Presentiments argues for the radical significance of our relational bonds with one another and the ways we dream ourselves into dialogues with the worlds around us, in order to imagine other futures.