To look at the sea is to become what one is
Manal Abu-Shaheen & Oscar René Cornejo
Curated by Laura Augosto
Opening September 20, 2019
Radiator Gallery, 10-61 Jackson Ave., LIC, New York
Funneled by the persistence
of waves, the sea recoils
just to the line of the horizon
The heart establishes its equations
while history rules itself
in the next room
--Etel Adnan, from “The Sky that Isn’t”
Pairing photographs by Manal Abu-Shaheen and sculptures by Oscar René Cornejo, To look at the sea is to become what one is considers ways of understanding place, somewhere between vision and memory, emotion and history, self-making and post-war forgetting. Together, Abu-Shaheen and Cornejo consider how we describe places that are impossible to return to–at least in the ways we remember them–despite their central importance in our emotional and intellectual lives. For both Abu-Shaheen and Cornejo, landscape and its materiality become a way of understanding what it means to be a post-war subject, or to come from a family fleeing conflict: both artists’ practices consider what we know about a place, a landscape, and its fluidity over time. Titled in homage to poet Etel Adnan, the exhibition finds the ghosts of the past in our intimate connections to the landscapes around us. These phantoms wander sites of ruin and reconstruction, touching the edges of how we understand ourselves, far from home and up against the constant movement of histories.
Cornejo’s sculptures, made at the scale of the human heart, continue his longstanding interest in the materials of construction as metaphors for displacement and resilience. He works with paired objects made of cotton, fresco, wood, handmade paper, and woodblock prints. Many of the objects hold plants and flowers; they are made at the scale of the things we can carry with us in crisis, and they enact the enigmatic healing force of portable, personal altars. Abu-Shaheen’s photographs follow the lives of her brother and his children at their farm in rural Pennsylvania. As structures crumble and are rebuilt, the children make worlds for themselves in costumes, collections of objects, and outdoor play. In their intimacy over a span of many years, the photographs allow the brave embrace of one American dream to abut the insistent difficulty of building a life far from home. Seen together, the works connect in their deep relationships to color and material, to scale and the quotidian. But they also remind us of the journeys so many of our elders have taken, so many of our beloveds still take. To be “in the heart of the heart of another country,” as Adnan writes, is to understand the depths of loss, to experience linguistic and cultural separations impossible to describe, and yet, still, to stitch together a life of both or many places. To look at the sea is to study one’s vulnerability, to embrace endless movement, to feel distance, and yet, still, to find the center of the self, even in the heart of constant change.
In response to the Queens Museum’s invitation to participate in its biennial exhibition “Queens International 2018: Volumes,” I created a site-specific installation and satellite works throughout the museum. My installation “A Night's Embrace/Farewell to be Greeted/Exposed by Dawn” is a Shoji screen grid, made of indigo landscape cells anchored by an obsidian chunk wrapped around Kumbuk lumber. The screens hinge on an 18-foot metal pole referencing the United States-Mexico border.
Flocked coal and crushed glass mirror the indigo screens as they reflect the lingering effects of scorched-earth policies that normalized violence and influenced Salvadoran refugees who responded to Los Angeles gang culture by establishing their own brand of violence. Smoky cloud imagery calls up the Salvadoran military burning enemy assets and points to the ambiguous repercussions of war. The blue chalk lines convey my memories of working with my father in construction in Texas. The materials that create the images speak to the ruptures within the social fabric of El Salvador.
In “Banderetta,” woodcut prints layer and distort imagery of historical events in Central America: the Sandinista revolution, the civil war in El Salvador, the movement of guerilla women. Shrouding these prints are color combinations of cotton cloths that carry propaganda and spiritual significance at the scale of physical human bodies.
“Peace Through Understanding” (PTU) and “Insurgently Sympathizing Peasant” (ISP) are sculptures installed throughout the Queens Museum's World's Fair cases that draw attention to tragic events in Central America near or during the times of the 1964 and 1934 World's Fair. The form and meaning of these abstract sculptures contrast with the optimistic notions of progress and international relations promoted by the Fairs. Taking the title of the 1964 World Fair, PTU resembles a fascist symbol to recall the dictatorships in Central America at the time, which were a precursor to the civil wars of the Eighties. In the 1939 section, ISP refers to the 1932 Salvadoran massacre known as La Matanza, in which a mostly indigenous peasant-led rebellion was suppressed by the government, with an estimated 25,000 deaths. Lava rock symbolizes devastation and loss within the work.
Queens International 2018: https://queensmuseum.org/2017/09/19311