Weave the Future Golden: Online Viewing Room

17 October - 17 November 2020

  • Eamon Ore-Giron 

    Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad 

    Yun-Fei Ji

    Tuan Andrew Nguyen

    Firelei Báez

     

     

    Weave the Future Golden draws its title from an essay by Sophia Al-Maria, Weave the Future Golden over Dark Days, a poetic call to action. She writes, "Use the tools you are given. Confront your histories with honesty. Rescue the unknowable future."¹

     

    Weave the Future Golden highlights a group of artists who summon their ancestral past in order to imagine alternative futures. Tapping into both personal and collective histories, each artist reinterprets folkloric traditions as repositories of shifting cultural knowledge. Folklore, commonly understood as traditional knowledge passed from generation to generation, has been historically undermined by colonial and imperial powers. Looking to folklore as sites of memory to be transformed, these artists reshape traditional culture into new narratives. The resulting artworks stir up conversations that reflect contemporary societal undercurrents in an attempt to evoke our collective subconscious.

  • Eamon Ore-Giron

  • In his abstract geometric paintings, Eamon Ore-Giron combines motifs and symbols drawn from sources that span geographies and time: the stylized geometry of Incan jewelry, Brazilian Neo-Concretism, Italian Futurism, and the spatial arrangements of Russian Suprematism. Inserting pictorial and rhythmic structures from the Global South into an expanded history of transnational abstraction, Ore-Giron's works embody what curator Marcela Guerrero refers to as “the sound and color of mestizo synesthesia.” His richly colored compositions draw on vocabularies of architecture, textiles, maps, hieroglyphics, and astral charts to arrive at an iconography that is uniquely his own. Bringing the past into dialogue with the contemporary, his practice seeks to destabilize linear, European art-historical inheritances by suggesting a shared heritage of forms and ideas.

  • In Ore-Giron’s ongoing series of paintings, Infinite Regress, the artist’s totemic visual language is subject to an unending process of...
    EAMON ORE-GIRON, Infinite Regress CXL, 2020 (detail)

    In Ore-Giron’s ongoing series of paintings, Infinite Regress, the artist’s totemic visual language is subject to an unending process of reformulation. In philosophy, infinite regress is a sequence of reasoning which can never come to an end, that disproves the concept of fixed knowledge. In connecting one element to another, a third one is always interpolated and continued endlessly. Ore-Giron’s palette and forms recall religious iconography, sacred landscapes, and celestial bodies in cyclical, non-linear passages of time. Consisting of simple forms shifting in and out of graphic fields of gold, the paintings in this series are each a variation on the one that came before, a trajectory into future possible iterations.

     

  • GAURI GILL & RAJESH VANGAD

  • Over the last decade, Gauri Gill has developed collaborative partnerships in an effort to blur the line between photographer and subject. In this instance, Gauri Gill and renowned Warli painter, Rajesh Vangad worked together on Fields of Sight, a series of photographs taken by Gill and then hand-inscribed in black paint by Vangad to co-create new imagery of life in Ganjad, a small farming village. These fantastical works combine the contemporary language of photography with that of ancient Warli drawing, a genre of folk art which utilizes the geometric vocabulary of circles, triangles, and squares to symbolize different elements in nature, and the world. In Three Suns, radial forms emanate from three statuesque male figures and Vangad himself is pictured on the far left. Upon closer inspection, each ray consists of miniature geometric figures representing people and animals, partaking in daily life as hand-drawn trains and planes whiz through the landscape. Fields of Sight address the challenges faced by indigenous communities, whose land rights are under threat as their environment changes and natural resources are either depleted or totally exhausted as modernity vies with rural life. 

     

  • “...I realized that so much of the narrative that I had received from Rajesh – the great stories, which had...
    GAURI GILL and RAJESH VANGAD, Three Suns from the series Fields of Sight, 2019 (detail)

    “...I realized that so much of the narrative that I had received from Rajesh – the great stories, which had made it come alive for me – was missing. Part of it I realized as the limitation – and unique presence of photography – to restrict what is in the image to ‘now’ … So we decided to collaborate in a more active way. Rajesh would inscribe his drawing over my photograph, meet my text with his own …”²

     

    - Gauri Gill

     

  • Yun-Fei Ji

  • Yun-Fei Ji utilizes the structures and symbols of folkloric tradition to speak truth to power. Full of phantoms, demons, and other spectral characters, Ji’s paintings have frequently functioned as metaphorical critiques of oppressive power structures—and strategies of defiance. In his ink and watercolor compositions, these ghostly figures are stand-ins for the complex political undercurrents and cultural tug-of-war shaping rural communities in a rapidly developing world.

     

    Ji is inspired by the ghost stories that he first learned growing up in the countryside during the late Chinese Cultural Revolution. He employs the stacked perspective and flattened space of classical Chinese painting to tell contemporary stories that, while geographically specific, speak to a collective human experience. The work often comments on the political realities of both the US and China, expressed in codes by using metaphor and allusion. There is a satirical streak, and his love of the grotesque is balanced with humor and a deep sense of irony. Each work is an act of resistance, insisting that narratives of displacement and environmental destruction are worth preserving.

     

  • Midnight Sudden Wind, 2018, is a painting from a body of work that explores the realities of life in rural...

    Midnight Sudden Wind, 2018, is a painting from a body of work that explores the realities of life in rural China. These works document the involuntary relocations of entire villages to make way for ambitious infrastructure development. Their compositions are populated by individualized, contemporary figures that inhabit a landscape in perpetual transition. Suspended between modernity and tradition, the village becomes a metaphor for community. The ghosts of ancestors and animal-like folkloric figures that intermingle with these present-day villagers act as potent reminders of the time-honored cultural traditions endangered by this march towards “progress.”

     

     

  • Tuan Andrew Nguyen

  • Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores the power of storytelling through video, sculpture and photography. Situated at the intersection of politics and history, Nguyen employs Vietnam's spiritual culture and tumultuous past as grounding forces to navigate global systems of power. Nguyen extracts and re-works dominant, oftentimes colonial histories and supernaturalisms into vividly imaginative vignettes. 

     

    Spirit of Bidong is a photographic work that depicts an imagined ‘last man on earth.’ Created in conjunction with Nguyen’s video project The Island, a film shot on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991. The film takes place in a dystopian future, the island now overgrown by jungle and filled with crumbling monuments and relics.

  • The lone figure of Spirit of Bidong, the last protector of the island, dons hand-made, sculptural headdresses that were made...

     TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN, Bidong 1, Bidong 2, Bidong 3, 2017

    The lone figure of Spirit of Bidong, the last protector of the island, dons hand-made, sculptural headdresses that were made from scavenged materials on the island as well as materials that washed ashore. They are a material embodiment of what it means to fill the voids left by history. The headdresses are ritual objects. Here, the human body is transformed by the totemic power of spiritual objects.

  • Firelei Báez

  • Firelei Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Drawing visual cues from folklore, sci-fi, and fantasy, her paintings frequently portray change-making creatures that inhabit fictional alternate universes with a stance of self-determination. Central to this work is the feminine-archetypal ciguapa, a trickster from Dominican folklore who, for Báez, embodies the potential to defy oppressive convention and break through generations of karmic loads. Shown here with lustrous manipulated hair, the figure serves as a shape-shifting agent for change—crouching in a strikingly active and self-reliant posture, the character becomes “so possessed of her body that she can easily, acrobatically, move between spaces.”

  • 'I grew up hearing stories of Lilith-like wild women from the forest, Ciguapas, told to me as a warning: you...
    FIRELEI BÁEZ, Untitled, 2020 (detail)
    "I grew up hearing stories of Lilith-like wild women from the forest, Ciguapas, told to me as a warning: you can’t be too wild, too much of nature, don't be too independent. Everything that’s inscribed onto that figure becomes the antithesis of ideal femininity. And then as a kid I’d think, 'There's so much freedom in that, why would I not want to be that? Why would I not want to be untraceable and fearless?'"³

    —Firelei Báez
     

  • Báez's paintings frequently portrays female Afro-Caribbean figures sidelined by—and yet absolutely foundational to—Western historical macro-narratives. This portrait depicts the diasporic goddess-figure known as Maman Brigitte in Haitian vodou and as Oya within the Yoruba tradition. In Haitian lore, she was a catalytic force behind the onset of the Haitian Revolution, credited with inspiring priestesses to sound the drums that led troops of enslaved people forward to fight for their freedom. By depicting the deity in a manner that layers symbolic references to subaltern revolutionary histories and Western portraiture, Báez encourages a more complex view of the independence movements that occurred throughout the Americas during this period. From Maman Brigitte’s mouth hangs an azabache, a symbol of protection in Latin America and the Caribbean, carving out space within the art historical canon for healing inasmuch as resistance.

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    ¹ Sophia Al-Maria, Sad Sack: Collected Writing, London, United Kingdom: Book Works, 2019.  

    ² Gauri Gill, excerpted from Gauri Gill, Fields of Sight, exhibition text, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata, West Bengal 2014

    ³  Video Feature for James Cohan Viewing Room, Firelei Báez, produced by James Cohan, 2020.