A Visit to Cecilia Vicuña's First US Survey at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive

Alex Brostoff checks out Cecilia Vicuña's first US survey exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, in the pages of Hyperallergic. Curated by Andrea Andersson and Julia Bryan-Wilson, it "features site-specific installations, a selection of short films, artist’s books, and over 100 precarios — precarious pieces that verge on disintegrating. This sensory show is at once dazzling — merging text with textile, the avant-garde with the ancient — and dooming in its conjuring of displacement, one endemic to ecological destruction in the wake of colonial occupation." From there: 

“Undoing completes the doing,” Vicuña writes in the catalogue. As unassuming as a stick planted along the shoreline, los precarios are plotted into landscapes where wind or water will wash them away. Bound by bone, shell, and thread, these small sculptures are made of feathers and pebbles, seeds and beads; their marrow is driftwood and tumbleweed. Here a cross, there a swirl — a feather frozen in flight, a tangled attempt at ignition. These balancing acts cast shadows that sway. “We are made of throwaways and we will be thrown away,” writes Vicuña.

Perhaps that is why a raft floats, suspended from the ceiling of the second gallery. “Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood” (2017) is a site-specific installation that features debris scavenged from the Mississippi coast of New Orleans, where the exhibition made its debut. “The Flood” at once evokes Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and a biblical deluge snaking through its base. And yet, the raft also promises “escape.” A voyage emerges from the wreckage, and from the refuse, a reclamation: Vicuña’s work commemorates calamity while transfiguring its ruin into another tomorrow.

Continue reading at Hyperallergic.