The World Is Before You

Curated by Naomi Lev
Assistant Curator: Minji Lee

Participants

Francisco echo Eraso
Willa Goettling
Maya Jeffereis
Gabrielle Ondine Mertz
Dario Mohr
Carrie Sijia Wang

EFA Project Space

July 6 - August 12, 2023

For the past six months the SHIFT residency artists have been activating their shared studio at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, meeting with professionals, and working on their projects towards a final exhibition. Throughout this time they were committed to diving into their individual processes, exploring their lineages, roots, and upbringings, and sharing distinct voices that encapsulate their rich and complex backgrounds. The results are artworks that capture personal stories of exploration, dedication, and labor that reflect on the history of our nation and reveal a magnitude of cultures and circumstances.

With two new films, Maya Jeffereis explores her ancestral history as Japanese laborers on Hawaiʻian sugarcane plantations. In Fields Fallen from Distant Songs (2023) Jeffereis interweaves folk songs and ghostly images, poetically and enigmatically exploring the past through a present day gaze. Here, Jeffereis blends 16mm home-videos shot by her grandfather (whose parents worked at the plantations), with footage from the 1906 Thomas Edison film “Hawaiian Islands,” as well as with colonialist archival materials, and digital videos of the artist's recent research-based trip to Hawaiʻi with her mother, where she captured volcano eruptions, thus creating a fusion of past and present. The artist’s great-grandparents moved to Hawaiʻi in 1904 with the aspiration of establishing a better future, and were disillusioned by the reality of plantation life. Through Japanese folk songs and contemporary Hawaiʻian poems that speak about the challenges of this reality, Jeffereis sets a soft yet penetrating tone. Nearby, Passages I (2023), is a single channel video installation created with archival documents and direct animation on film and projected onto a sugar glass screen. This experimental video, created through the artist’s intervention with a chemigram process, sets the tone by providing an unusual metaphoric space. The notion of labor comes to life as it bears the physical memory of migration, adaptation, and struggle.

Ideas of labor and working-class identity are investigated and become themes in Willa Goettling’s work. Here, Goettling presents four hand-engraved stones on shelves, an accordion-fold handmade book that contains the artist’s poetry, alongside a black and white photographic image of a cave printed onto plexi-glass. Goettling’s fascination with limestone derives from her father’s background as a stone mason. In a captivating manner the artist is able to create poetry by simply stating facts about the geological and industrial processes the stone undergoes, embodying its nature with affection and care. In return, the limestone reveals itself to be multifaceted, abundant, responsive, and adaptable. In her poem the artist describes a process of dissociation of the limestone when the stone is “forcefully teased apart” – a process of separation and transformation. Goettling’s exploration of the self and family lineage reveals softness and resilience, and her creative process is filled with rich manual labor; from sanding and engraving the stones to hand-binding an edition of artists' books.

Carrie Sijia Wang has spent the duration of the residency exploring her own identity and comfort level in this country. Her incentive through Hey Alien (2023) is to reflect on the various bureaucratic processes as well as mundane encounters she has experienced as an immigrant. The installation consists of a welcoming video and flyers, and a screen-based interactive experience in which the audience is confronted with the inquisitive questions and bureaucratic processes of entering “The Beautiful Planet,” drawn from the Mandarin translation of the United States as "The Beautiful Nation." With a computer respondent software the artist has programmed, the acceptance interview into this beautiful land is filled with doubts, miscommunication, and offensive commentary. Questions like “Why should I let you stay?” and comments such as “Our portal isn’t open to everyone” reveal the prejudice and ignorant nature of these processes. Wang created an atmosphere of a fantastic world that seems celestial and profound, yet once facing the camera one encounters abuse and frustration. By utilizing her wit and sense of humor, Wang recreates personal experiences into sarcastic occurrences.

At the far end of the gallery, Dario Mohr’s installation Trophies of War: Kingdom of Light (2023) consists of eight sculptural objects situated on large pedestals, alongside a human-size pillar accompanied by an audio conversation with citizens who guided Mohr, driving across borders from Ghana to Togo, Benin and Nigeria, where he was able to connect with his ancestral land and history. The objects in this installation are created using found materials, and are each unique in their energy and essence. Mohr refers to the objects as Trophies, and examines the origins of the word, its initial purpose, its convoluted history, and its present meaning. In Latin and ancient Greek the term “trophée” refers to human captives, and human remains taken from a defeated army and set up as a memorial of victory. In the current installation the trophies are individually lit, creating a collective ceremonial atmosphere which resonates and articulates the audio conversation shared through the pillar. In this conversation Mohr and his guides discuss Vodun, spirituality, and christianity. The conversation concludes with the understanding of the colonization processes in Africa, which divided countries and tribes, creating forced alienation. As we gain an understanding of Trophies and the way this notion is celebrated in modern culture, we can potentially reflect on the complexities, misguidance, and ignorance that we so willingly take part in. As the trophies light up the room, Mohr pays homage to his ancestors, celebrating and mourning the vestiges of tribal societies of West Africa.

Situated in the center of the space, Francisco echo Eraso presents a large loom designed and programmed to create a large double woven textile with red and yellow linen, layered to create a large square cross with pockets for ceremonial use. Flor de cuatro pétalos (2023), serves as a means to express the artist's experience of dealing with grief as an ongoing process. Eraso shares a story of his abuelito who was the president of the Red Cross in southern Colombia, and has passed during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Combining his accessibility work through an intervention of Audio Description in the space alongside durational performances throughout the show, as he continues to weave the fabric, Eraso’s various practices exemplify the complexity and layers of meanings in his work; referring to the colors, Eraso shares the use of yellow as a signifier of the histories of colonialism within a Colombian-American context, when the search for gold was a driving factor in the exploration and colonization of indigenous lands. Combined with the color red, which symbolizes the red cross, these two create an intricate relationship, one that is tied to the politics of national aid and to ongoing colonial realities.

For this exhibition Gabrielle Ondine Mertz created six vibrant layered pigment paintings on paper that synthesize culturally-defining moments of the Media Age. The process of creating these analog gifs, as she refers to them, is by combining both digital and analog components; Mertz digitally paints a sequence of stills from the moving image source, then physically creates a layered image through pigment printing, and then hand finishes the work – a labor intensive process that involves the artist’s ongoing interventions. In this series Mertz addresses cultural signifiers that point at the evolution of broadcast and social media technology (i.e., the first 24-hour news broadcast, a C-SPAN camera capturing a moment just before the January 6th Capitol attack, a viral dance from Tiktok), reflecting the impact of and changes to mediated experiences over the past forty years. Each of these moments reveals a fleeting drama which ultimately changed the way we see, understand, and communicate contemporary reality. These moments signify all that strongly affects us right now: politically, socially, intellectually, economically, and ecologically, and sum up our most radical concerns into works of art that play with the poignant divide between our nature as analog beings and our digital manifestations.

In Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin writes: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” 1 The artists in this exhibition present their consistent strive to understand and present a unique view of their heritage, roots, and influences. It is an accumulation of their whole being; their being as artists, as arts workers, and as humans in this world. The voices in this exhibition are poetic and clear, voices that are heard so vividly and strongly, and that echo their passion as well as their pain. Their consideration, delicacy, and empathy while dealing with what their bodies remember is prominent, filling the space with an abundance of intricate stories, realizations, beauty, and hope.

Public Programs:

Opening Reception: Poetry Reading and Musical Performance
Thursday, July 6, 6:30-8:30 PM

Poetry reading by Willa Goettling and Musical Performance by Nava Dunkelman. Organized by Maya Jeffereis and Willa Goettling

It’s One Year From Today And Here Are The Headlines
Thursday, July 20, 6:30-8:30 PM

Gabrielle Ondine Mertz and Carrie Sijia Wang in conversation about art, AI Technology, & The News of the Future, along with the release of their new collaborative work, “It’s One Year From Today And These Are The Headlines”. Organized by Gabrielle Ondine Mertz and Carrie Sijia Wang

Catalog Launch and Grieving Rituals
Thursday, August 10, 6:30-8:30 PM

Performance by Dario Mohr and Percussionist Kraig Blue, alongside culminating performance by Francisco echo Eraso. Organized by Francisco echo Eraso and Dario Mohr

Press:
Aoko—born away from home: Claiming and Creating Identity at EFA Project Space, NYC, ArteFuse

Installation Photos by Julia Gillard
Event Photography by & EFA Project Space
All photos courtesy of EFA Project Space