Installation Images
Pollock Gallery
Laray Polk. Bayside, Shoreline, Dune, 2022
Upon entering the Pollock Gallery, visitors confront Laray Polk's Bayside, Shoreline, Dune. Polk employs sieves typically used by researchers to separate different samples of sand particles. Collected in the Bolivar Peninsula, the samples are laid on the floor side by side, evidencing the variations between the bayside, shoreline, and dune sand. The work’s serial disposition on the floor invites visitors to advance into the gallery space.
Laray Polk. Trinity River Sediment, Bolivar Peninsula, 2022
In Polk's words, Trinity River Sediment, Bolivar Peninsula "pulls viewers in and tosses them back." Polk took this photograph at the point where the Trinity River reaches its end as it merges with the Gulf of Mexico. It becomes a connecting knot within the artist's work, linking the vestiges of the river and the coast present in all Polk’s pieces. Found residues on the beach are treated as traits of the present-day human relationship with the river. They become another tie between inland bodies of water and coastal landscapes.
Laray Polk. The Silt Clock, 2016 and Trinity River Sediment Table, 2018
The Silt Clock contains four bottles holding water from the Trinity River. The work is activated by systematically shaking each bottle at different moments and days, showing various states of particle suspension. The first bottle represents the natural state of the Trinity (agitated and turbid). The second bottle shows particles settling out (last agitated 24 hours prior). The third bottle contains a water sample completely settled out (last shaken two weeks prior). The fourth bottle contains Trinity River water that came out from the tap, after being treated by the city.
At the back of the gallery, Polk's Trinity River Sediment Table displays sediment the artist collected from the river in a vitrine. The river sediment can be compared with the coastal sand samples on the floor, creating another point of connection between the river and coastal landscapes.
Ubiratan Gamalodtaba Suruí. Untitled photographic series, 2019-2022
The Pollock Gallery presents Ubiratan Gamalodtaba Suruí’s color photographic series. It invites viewers to dive into the Paiter Suruí (meaning “true people” in the Suruí language) universe. Colors and textures, spatial recession and orthogonal lines, gestures and aerial views exert a force of attraction. Special attention is given to clay and its cosmological connection with water. In one photograph, Mapidikin molds the clay (gãnjág) into a vessel (itxira). In Suruí cosmology, a mother transformed her body into clay and was deposited in the river, so her daughter could make pots and cook with them. Clay is extracted from river springs, involving specific ritual practices exclusive to women. The collected clay is transported in cargo baskets. Clay cannot touch the ground to avoid contamination, usually deposited on palm tree leaves or tree bark. After molding, the pot is burnt on a ground fire and wrapped with specific Amazonian tree leaves for sealing.
Ubiratan Suruí also photographs other Suruí techniques and knowledge: the typical collective house or lab-moy; the therapeutic use of the matxag tree; Gasodá Suruí is portrayed playing a musical instrument known as taquara. Aerial views show the Lapetanha village, one among twenty-nine Suruí villages. The image of the territorial border (Garáh katab) records the deforestation expansion outside the Suruí lands.
Gabriel Bicho. Afetos Efêmeros [Ephemeral Affects] #1, #2, and #3, 2019
Gabriel Bicho's multichannel video installation Afetos Efêmeros [Ephemeral Affects] mixes sound and visual experience. The images evoke the alternate rising and falling of the water on Cotijuba island in Brazil. The Sun and Moon cycles influence the tide. Like our memory, fragmented, tangled sound and blurred images produce arbitrary associations. Bicho took them when the artist visited the island. He recorded the audio in public markets in three Brazilian cities: Belém, Porto Velho, and Porto Alegre. The audiovisual work registers the artist's trajectories in time and space. The videos combine different sorts of temporality: the periodical and rhythmic time of the tide, Moon, Sun, and the artist’s memory; and the occasional and intermittent time of the traveling body from one place to another.
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas. The Teachings of the Hands, 2020
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas' experimental documentary The Teachings of the Hands is screened in the adjacent room.
"The rivers run with the blood of my people and their tears in Texas. History does not start with the Alamo; it starts with this river. It did not start with the missions, it started before that, and they just kept it out of history," says Juan Mancias, chief of the Texas' Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe. Mancias’ speech resonates through the images and sounds of the Devils River. Mancias is the voice and owner of the film’s storyline, which is shaped by indigenous cosmology. Humans, non-humans, and the land are interconnected in the narrative of the origin of the world, and their mutual collaboration is fundamental for the continuance of life on the planet. This story moves away from extractive economies' reductive understanding of the environment as resource and inert lifeless matter.
The visual sequence combines re-enactments of colonial occupation, landscape views, archival footage, environmental wounds, and indigenous marks on the stones. The film uncovers recent infrastructural development with its deep roots in colonization. They are parts of the same historical process that resulted in the decimation and cultural suppression of native people and predatory exploitation of the land.
Hawn Gallery
Laray Polk. Three Gabions, 2022
Gabriel Bicho. Abu-nã[o], 2015
The installations, videos, and photographs at the Hawn Gallery deal with potential and kinetic energies. Laray Polk’s Three Gabions establishes a tense relationship with Gabriel Bicho’s video Abu-nã[o ]. While the former employs cages used to halt riverbank erosion and is placed on the gallery’s floor, the latter is projected on the back wall evoking the force of water motion.
Gabriel Bicho. Reintegração [Reintegration/ Rehabilitation], 2014
Gabriel Bicho. Não [No] #11, [2015] 2022
Gabriel Bicho. Sempre tem uns restinhos [Something always remains], [2016] 2022
The video Reintegração [Reintegration/ Rehabilitation] focuses on repetitive shovel movements. In it, two men engage in an intense effort to clear the mud dragged into the building during the 2014 Madeira River flood in Porto Velho, Brazil. Next to the video, one photograph of the series Não [No] indicates the rise of the river level during the flood.
According to official reports, the main causes of the Madeira River flood were the riverbank erosion provoked by the construction of two hydroelectric power stations, Jirau and Santo Antônio, and the implementation of the waterway system for soy transportation. The disastrous 2014 flood left around 800 families homeless, mainly in riverine areas. It also destroyed downtown residential and commercial neighborhoods. It disrupted the bio-hydric cycle with consequential biodiversity loss, negatively impacting the economic activities of fishermen.
Bicho revisits this traumatic episode in Sempre tem uns restinhos [Something always remains], wondering whether it is possible to restore the ecological balance and the sense of vital cooperation between the communities and the river after such destructive environmental catastrophe.
Ubiratan Gamalodtaba Suruí, Untitled photographic series, 2019-2022
There is no life without rivers, no culture without water. The Branco River waters imprint their mark on the Suruí territorial landscape. The photographic series displayed at the Hawn Gallery shows the relations of cooperation between the Paiter Suruí people and water sources. The river provides fish, clay for pot making, water for consumption and agriculture. Water is used in body painting. A pair of photographs show the making of genipap pigment and traditional body painting designs. Women's designs are made with small circles while men's body painting privileges lines.
The Suruí have been fighting against illegal gold prospecting in their lands. This activity pollutes the rivers, risking the social network of the Amazonian biome. Gold prospectors clearcut the forest and drill the soil. In addition to the resulting deforestation they provoke, they dump residues, including mercury, into the rivers, streams, and other water sources nearby. The Suruí people have used drones to watch, denounce, and control illegal activities in their territory. According to Ubiratan, illicit prospecting of gold has increased in the last years, during Jair Bolsonaro's presidential term.
