Additional Resources for TERRITORIAL
Artist Bios, Work Descriptions, Curator’s Recommended Reading
Rachelle Dang
Uncertain Haven, 2019
Wood, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, air-dried clay, wire, stained glass, metal
Courtesy of the artist
Artist Website
About the Work:
Over several years Rachelle Dang has reconstructed various 18th century botanical transport carriers based on scientific designs and historical illustrations. Her approach draws from her family’s history in Hawaii—herself born and raised there—and an acute awareness of environmental vulnerabilities and the lasting effects of colonialism. She intertwines ecological, colonial, and personal narratives embedded in these elaborate cabinets, which were originally produced to transport living tropical plant species across oceans to Europe and to other colonial territories.
In this work, Dang has enlarged and subtly altered the transport carrier, sealing off the interior; its unknown contents behind three layers of wood and opaque stained glass. While the original form operated within a larger naturalist and colonial project to transfer living plant specimens globally, she has rendered the conveyor non-functional. The cabinet, stripped of its function, takes on a psychological resonance. Resembling a small house with its familiar A-frame structure, the form also alludes to a cage, trunk, or tomb. Dang’s use of color and its gradient application references an 18th century French watercolor drawing depicting the wooden carrier resting weightlessly over tufted pillows of grass—in a strange field extending to the milky horizon.
Leaf forms—brittle like porcelain—are caught between the glass panes and the boarded inner chamber of the carrier on one side. The cabinet structure has also been surrounded with an undulating floor of worn and misshapen cushions, hand-built in clay. These cushions—once supple markers of comfort and safety—are rendered rigid, their parched and cracked surfaces attest to strain and desiccation, evoking a barren topography. The carrier and its surrounding elements suggest an unsettling landscape of loss and displacement; of questionable protection or an Uncertain Haven.
-Excerpted from artist’s website
About the artist:
Rachelle Dang (b. Honolulu, HI) creates sculptures and interdisciplinary projects that engage with the environmental legacies of colonialism. Her works examine interwoven narratives across time and place, bringing together historical facts, botanical research, personal memories, and poetic allusion. She is Critic at the Yale School of Art, a current artist resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (2022-23), and previously Artist Fellow at the Museum of Arts and Design (2022), where she was given generous support and access to facilities to produce a major new new body of work for her two-person show at Someday, New York (2022). Dang's work has been exhibited at venues such as A.I.R., Brooklyn (2020); Cornell University, Ithaca (2022); Casey Kaplan, New York (2021); Fergus McCaffrey, St. Barth and New York (2021 & 2019); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn (2019-2020); Lesley Heller, New York (2020); Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City (2019); Haverford College Art Galleries, Philadelphia (2019); Hawaii Pacific University, Kaneohe (2013) and the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii (2011 Biennial), among others. She lives and works in New York.
Amanda Brazier
Here, 2023
Handmade watercolor on handmade paper, linen thread
Courtesy of the artist
Work Description
Birdsong Chart
Planting Guide
Artist Statement
Website
About the Artist:
Amanda Brazier (b. 1986, Nashville, TN) is a painter living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Since 2011, she has been gathering and using local earth pigments in her paintings in order to connect more deeply with the history and material of painting and place. She also teaches and facilitates programs for the public art organization Mark Making. Her work has been shown at the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Asheville Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Southern Adventist University, Freed-Hardeman University, and Spalding Nix Fine Art. Publications featuring her work include New American Paintings and Anthology Magazine.
Gideon Mendel
Chinta and Samundri Davi, Salempur Village near Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India. August 2007
Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive
Courtesy of the artist and Axis Gallery, South Orange, NJ
Christa and Salomon Raymond Fils. Decade Village, Haiti. September 2008
Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive
Courtesy of the artist and Axis Gallery, South Orange, NJ
Lucas Williams, Lawshe Plantation, South Carolina, USA October 2015
Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive
Courtesy of the artist and Axis Gallery, South Orange, NJ
Artist Website
About the Work:
Submerged Portaits, Drowning World is an exploration of flooding using photography and video. My aim in this long-term project is to portray the human condition within the context of overwhelming climate events around the world. This endeavor has taken me on a creative and life-changing journey. The subject matter has fundamentally challenged my practice: over the years, there has been a shift from a traditional documentary approach to one that incorporates more conceptual and metaphorical elements alongside a deepening activism.
In 2007, I photographed two floods that occurred within weeks of each other, one in the UK and the other in India. I was struck by the contrasting impacts of these floods, and the shared vulnerability that seemed to unite the people I encountered in this landscape.
Since then, I have endeavored to visit flood zones around the world, witnessing a shared human experience of catastrophe that transcends geographical cultural and economic divides. The project now incorporates the UK (2007, 2014, and 2016), India (2007 and 2014), Haiti (2008), Pakistan (2010), Australia (2011), Thailand (2011), Nigeria (2012), Germany (2013), The Philippines (2013), Brazil (2015), Bangladesh (2015), the USA (2015, 2017, and 2018), and France (2016 and 2018).
Drowning World includes some of the poorest and wealthiest communities on the planet, all exposed to the floodwater that envelopes them. In this moment, the floods are a leveling factor, and people are brought together in visual solidarity.
In the Submerged Portraits series, my subjects pause and engage the camera looking out from their inundated homes and devastated environments. The pose may seem convention, yet the context is catastrophe, and their gazes are unsettling. They are not disempowered victims: they show agency amidst the calamity that has befallen them.
Over the years of making this work, the global geopolitical situation in relation to our climate emergency has become increasingly urgent. As we experience so many extreme weather events, drive by climate change, we also see ever-more aggressive denialism (often espoused by populist leaders); a global political system incapable of taking meaningful action; and petro-carbon corporations that are resistant to adopting the most minor measure to reduce carbon emissions. In the face of this, I feel a personal responsibility to make this project speak as loudly as possible.
-Excerpted from artist’s website
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Gideon Mendel (b. 1959, Johannesburg, South Africa) works in both photography and film. He began photographing in the 1980s, during the final years of apartheid, documenting the brutality of the South African state’s response to peaceful protest. In the early 1990s he moved to the UK and embarked on a project capturing the worldwide impact of HIV and AIDS. Since 2007, Mendel has been working on Drowning World, an art and advocacy project about flooding that has been exhibited in numerous museums internationally. His works have also been published in magazines such as National Geographic, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, The Independent Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Geo and Aperture Magazine. Amongst many accolades, Mendel has won the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, the Amnesty International Media Award, the Greenpeace Photo Award and he has been shortlisted.
John Gerrard
Petro National #40 (Yemen), 2022
Computer simulation on monitor
Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery, New York, NY
Artist Website
About the Work:
John Gerrard’s Flag and Petro National series renders life-like computer simulations of rivers from around the world including the Amazon, Danube, Nile and Yangtze. For Petro National #40 (Yemen), Gerrard produces a portrait of a small section of a river (or “wadi”) in Yemen, whose watery surface reflects actual buildings and flora in the surrounding area. Centered on the screen is also a gasoline spill in the shape of the country, accurately refracting light to create a vivid prismatic field.
The roll of the river causes the oil spill to wave and undulate in a flag–like form, drawing allusions to the ways in which resource extraction industries incite tension regarding land ownership across international borders. As is typical with Gerrard’s work, the scenes are non durational, instead they are rendered live to unfold over the course of an annual solar cycle, with each Flag keyed to its particular local time.The viewpoint circles this form while the work unfolds over a 365 day solar cycle of night and day.
About the Artist:
John Gerrard, (b. 1974, Dublin, Ireland) is best known for his sculptures, which typically take the form of digital simulations displayed using Real-time computer graphics. Breaching the divisions between portrait, landscape and history painting, generating moving images that no longer belong to ‘time-based media’, rethinking the monumentalism of land art in the age of Google Earth, and now exploring an expanded arena of choreography and performance, the innovative form of Gerrard’s work keeps pace with the subtle complexity of its subject-matter.
Gerrard has had solo exhibitions at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madird, Spain (2019); Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA (2018); Somerset House in London, UK (2017), among others. He has participated in group exhibitions including the Texas Biennial, McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX (2021); Oil: Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2021); Feel the Sun in Your Mouth: Recent Acquisitions, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2019), and many others. John Gerrard received his MFA from the School of Art Institute Chicago (2000), and his BFA in Sculpture at The Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing, Oxford University (1997).
LaRissa Rogers
A Poetic of Living, 2021/2023
Soil from Chattanooga, TN and Pen Park and Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville, VA Celosia, Fungus, Oxygen, Light, Care
Courtesy of the artist
On Belonging: The Space in Between, 2021/2023
Soil from the borderlines of states crossed between California to Virginia, porcelain, candied brown sugar, raw brown sugar, photographs, sod, celosia, oxygen, light, care
Courtesy of the artist
Artist Website
About the Work:
A Poetic of Living uses soil as a material that speaks to Black aliveness and resilience given how closely Black people are indexed to death. We remain through the soil. Soil holds trauma, displacement, memory, and history but is also a place of regeneration, possibility, and future.
Pen Park’s Recreation park, formerly known as Pen Park Plantation, has a golf course. On the golf course are forty-three unmarked slave graves. At Farmington there is a hanging tree where John Henry James was lynched in 1898. There are no forms of acknowledgement within these two spaces.
This work explores amnesia and how it is built into our quotidian spaces and influences our concept of history, stories remembered, things preserved, maintained, unaltered, or allowed to remain still. As you enter the space, the smell of wet mildew infiltrates the body, and uses repulsion as an aesthetic strategy. Yet, this smell derives from soil being what it is and asks the question: what would it mean if black people could just exist without the fear of corporeal violence? The viewer then has to walk over the soil to enter the space. In this action, they no longer become a spectator without agency, but rather, have to confront the soil to continue.
I am interested in these hidden histories and using a gesture of what it means to memorialize that is not linked to an Enlightenment framework of what it means to remain, such as a monument. In this installation, I use my body made from soil and place them in the soil from Pen Park and Farmington Country Club, two locations that are linked to past and present traumas and erasure. I place the soil body back in the earth, as an alternative monument that is made of our ancestors. One that grows life while seemingly unable to do so. Celosia, a plant native to East Africa and presumed to be brought over during the transatlantic slave trade along with fungus are then grown on the soil bodies. Through the eventual disintegration of the soil bodies, only the celosia and plants will remain. In this gesture, I ask the audience to consider systems of labor and loss enacted on the body as well as the food, plants, and knowledge transferred by enslaved people that has given root to what we see and know of beauty, intellect, technologies, and the sustenance we eat today. Soil becomes a way to speak to this notion of Black aliveness despite death and the ways one can care (through the act of growing and tending to these plants) that accounts for a possible otherwise despite the terror. The fungus and celosia simultaneously speak to the capacity of Blackness to evade capture and supersede the confines of whiteness.
On Belonging: The Space In Between punctuates the importance of place, belonging, and care by excavating the hidden histories embedded in the land as a means of regeneration, possibility, and growth. The artist builds installations that pay homage to the interconnected histories in the soil and land from which they are created, in order to explore the dual nature of flight and migration as a means of survival and self-preservation, speaking particularly to diasporic resilience.
As a second-generation Afro-Asian woman who recently relocated from the East to the West coast, she relates personally to the dislocation and unfamiliarity of the self as connected to any one particular place or history. She delves into the nature and complexity of her blackness by addressing ideas of cultural hybridity and visibility.
Pushing away from colonized notions of land as possession or indigeneity, the artist explores the processes of movement as a practice black and brown people have used to conceptualize place, belonging, and cohabitation. Through our relationship with the Earth, this dislocation can be nurtured, as migration refuses hierarchies of possession and ecology. The ephemeral and transformative nature of these sculptures confronts temporality as outside of linear chronology, to assert that rest, regeneration, and cultivation are titular to progression.
In relation to core samples as the root of the Earth, the layers of the soil slabs and stratification of the sugar represent the components of the histories and shared experiences that our society is built upon. The artist juxtaposes a myriad of imagery within her work--historical, personal, and current-day events--to relate not only the hybridity which manifests in many different cultures and histories, but also the similarities of past and present societal structures such as the plantation system, sports, capitalism, patriarchy, commodification, and labor. The proximity of this imagery draws micro- and macro-parallels in the cyclical effect of the personal, relating to and affecting the larger world experience. The artist grew celosia from seedlings and embedded them into the soil, positioned in a place where they were subject to failure due to the lack of sunlight.
-Excerpted from artist’s website
About the artist:
LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996) is a Black and Korean antidisciplinary artist raised in Ruckersville, VA. She is currently based between Virginia and Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Painting and Printmaking and BIS in International Fashion Buying from Virginia Commonwealth University. Rogers has exhibited and performed in institutions such as Frieze Seoul (Korea), Documenta 15 (Germany), Fields Projects (NY), M+B Gallery (CA), 1708 Gallery (VA), Second Street Gallery (VA), Black Ground (Colombia), W Doha (Qatar), The Fronte Arte Cultura (CA), LACE (CA), Grand Central Art Center (CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (VA) among others. She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Black Artists and Designers Guild Creative Futures Grant (2022). Rogers attended the BEMIS Center of Contemporary Art Residency (2022), Black Spatial Relics Residency (2022), and SOMA (2019), among others. Rogers is currently pursuing her MFA in New Genres at the University of California Los Angeles.
Cara Romero
Evolvers, 2019
Digital print on dibond
© Cara Romero. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.
Artist Website
About the Work:
Romero’s Evolvers (2019), a work part of the series Jackrabbit, Cottontail & Spirits of the Desert series, was originally commissioned for and installed on billboards for the 2019 edition of Desert X in Coachella Valley. The image features four children running in the desert through a field of windmill turbines. Romero calls these children “time-traveling visitors from Chemehuevi” who represent warriors of memory, fighting to remind us of the sustained colonial occupation of Indigenous lands and the attempts at forced assimilation and erasure of Indigenous cultures. Evolvers is exemplary of Romero’s practice, through which she creates visibility for Indigenous peoples globally and her home territory in and around the Chemehuevi reservation in Southern California. She also aims to amplify conversations about climate collapse and environmental racism.
Upon enrolling in a black-and-white photography class with protest photographer Bill Thomas, Romero re-directed her work. “It all really came from a place of not seeing [Indigenous peoples’] reflection in academia and media portrayals,” Romero told Hyperallergic during an interview. “I have this lived experience in the Southwest, on the reservation. Having that perspective going to a big urban epicenter that was outside of the Southwest, I realized the rest of America has no grasp of who we are.
-Excerpted from Erin Joyce, “Cara Romero Stands Defiant Against Institutional Categorization” in Hyperallergic
About the Artist:
Cara Romero (b. 1977, Inglewood, CA) is a contemporary fine art photographer, and enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. She was raised between the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, CA and the urban sprawl of Houston, TX. Her photography, which is informed by her identity, examines Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective.
Romero attended the University of Houston to obtain a degree in cultural anthropology, though later pursued photography to speak on Indigenous culture and representation. Since 1998, her work has been informed by formal training of film, digital, fine art and commercial photography. Romero maintains a studio in Santa Fe, NM, and participates in Native American art fairs and panel discussions, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019). Her award-winning work is included in many public and private collections internationally. She divides her time between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation.
Kandis Williams
Annexation: A Tango, 2020
HD video in color with sound
Courtesy of the artist and Moran Moran, Los Angeles, CA
Artist Website
About the Work:
Annexation: A Tango captures dancer Roderick George performing the tango - at times individually and other times with an abstracted figure - across scenes of California forest fires and Virginia farm prisons, including the Lorton Reformatory and the Virginia State Farm Prison. Set to music born from enslaved African spirituals and a backdrop of sites tilled and extinguished by imprisoned people, Kandis Williams’ film Annexation: A Tango illustrates the enduring link between the cultivation of plant life and forced labor. The film also takes on similar forms to a collage - or the piecing together of seemingly disparate imagery - to emphasize the transculturation and metamorphosis of Black creative expression due to ongoing subjugative, enforced labor.
Staggered along Virginian waterways—the same aquatic routes jetting from Richmond that established the intranational slave trade—are the Lorton Reformatory and the Virginia State Farm Prison of Goochland County. Having operated from 1910 to 2001, the Lorton Reformatory was developed to hold Washington D.C.’s “mundane disorderlies,” or the men and women indulging in the capital’s brothel and bar scenes. Under the guise of rehabilitation, Lorton prisoners were subjected to agricultural labor programs ranging from the cultivation of fields, pasture lands, poultry farms to hog ranches and blacksmith shops all spread across the nearly 3,200 acre campus. In the 1970s and 1980s, the facility also held noteworthy musicians, including “the Godfather of Go-Go” Chuck Brown and Bad Brains front man H.R, one of the many cultural moments overlooked and unremarked at prison centers due to inaccessible or incomplete archival resources. By 2002, after decades of overcrowding and disrepair, the Reformatory was converted into the Workhouse Art Center, now a locally revered visual and performing arts hub composed of artist studios, music rooms, and galleries.
By comparison, the Virginia State Farm Prison, which operated from 1896 to 2011 and still has areas in use today, served as a cinematic backdrop for performative, reenactments of slavery in Harriet (2019) and Lincoln (2012) where real, enforced labor occurred. Williams emphasizes in the film each prison’s uncanny reproduction of colonial plantation-style architecture, landscape, suppression of culture, and—of course—exploitative labor.
The tango bears origins to Central and West Africa, and is a dynamic dance infused with spiritual, metaphorical meanings with each kinetic movement. Introduced to South America in the mid-nineteenth century by enslaved Africans arriving via the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the tango was quickly appropriated, reworked, and repurposed into dances serving the co-opters’ agenda. The candombe, for example, was one of tango’s original forms performed by African descendants living in Uruguay and Argentina’s impoverished areas in the 1830s to 1840s. It was later fetishized by native South American men who employed the candome’s sensual, cheek-to-cheek postures as a choreographic display of infatuation and possession of their partner or another being. Now a collage-like product composed of South American and even Italian interventions, the tango encapsulates the ways absorption and annexation equates to cultural erasure.
-Excerpted from Haley Clouser, “Collage and (In)Visible Histories: Kandis Williams at ICA VCU,” Burnaway
About the Artist:
Kandis Williams (b. 1985, Baltimore, MD) received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2009. She has presented solo exhibitions at 52 Walker, a David Zwirner exhibition space, New York, NY; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Works on Paper, Vienna; St. Charles Projects, Baltimore, MD; and SADE, Los Angeles. She has participated in group exhibitions at several institutions, including the Hammer Museum and Huntington Libraries, Los Angeles; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Her work has recently been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artforum, GQ Style, Frieze, W Magazine, LA Weekly, and Cultured, among others. Her work are featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore. She is the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Mohn Award and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ 2021 Grants to Artists Award.
Recommended Readings and Related Exhibitions
Jeffery Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, 2017
Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” November 10, 1963
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortize, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 2015
Haley Clouser, “Collage and (In)Visible Histories: Kandis Williams at ICA VCU,” Burnaway, 2020
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,
Makeda Best, Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, Harvard Art Museums, November 2021, exh. Cat., exhibition link: https://harvardartmuseums.org/exhibitions/5877/devour-the-land-war-and-american-landscape-photography-since-1970
Caroline A. Jones and Natalie Bell, Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, MIT Press and MIT List Visual Arts Center, November 2022., exh. Cat., exhibition link: https://listart.mit.edu/exhibitions/symbionts-contemporary-artists-biosphere
Valerie Cassel Oliver, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, May 2021, exh. Cat, exhibition link: https://vmfa.museum/exhibitions/exhibitions/dirty-south-contemporary-art-material-culture-sonic-impulse/
Johanna Minich, American Land, American People, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, exhibition link: https://vmfa.museum/collections/stories/american-land-american-people/