Ear to the Earth
Alva Mooses’ new ceramic sculptures navigate the collapse of an anthropocentric, climate-damaged world. Deflated terrestrial globes—objects that emerged with the onset of colonization to map, chart, and therefore conquer land and bodies of water—sink under their own weight, creating erogenous slits and openings in the process. Broken or no longer erect, the stands designed to uphold them become inoperative. Alva’s deconstructed globes undermine the project of western geography and the violence of its measuring tools, favoring instead a world, earth, planet governed by the erotics of its own materials. Out of these ruins of colonial domination, she composes a new syntax–sentences written with pieces of the shattered globe stands immersed in porcelain tablets. Between past disasters and ominous futures, Mooses creates sculptures inviting viewers to attune their senses to the very composition of the earth— its soil and minerals—rather than to its representation.
-Mirene Arsanios
(Be) Longing @ TSA New York
February 19 – March 27, 2022
Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present (Be)Longing an exhibition of works by artists Jesus Benavente, Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Bonam Kim, and Alva Mooses. Nostalgia is a nexus for the works. Each one confronting and analyzing the complexity of nostalgia as a lingering sentiment and an underlying perspective to their history and identity. Through the image and object, they explore personal and universal confinements of living and being in the United States.
Curated by Eva Mayha Davis and Cecile Chong.
Photo by Argenis Apollinario.
Letters of a Compass
Space Coiled Like A Serpent, LES PRINTSHOP
Lower East Side Printshop is pleased to present Space Coiled Like A Serpent with guest curator David Crane. The exhibition will be on view on the Printshop’s website from December 8, 2021 – February 4, 2022.
Open Letter Chapbook Design | Publication Launch + Reading
Chapbook Collaboration for Simone White’s poem, Open Letter, comissioned by Center for Book Arts, NYC. Edition of 100.
Collective View at ARTLOT
Installation at Art Lot August 1, 2021 | 206 Columbia Street, Brooklyn
milkweed grows
to nurture a voyage across a continent
from two terracotta nipples
the sole host for monarchs to lay eggs
immortal plants are a poisonous remedy
artisanal contraceptive, emetic, ritual cleansing
meso-american matriarch cures her child’s lungs
by chewing on roots of asclepias incarnata
You Enter Dancing/ There’s Always Sign
Review by Tatiane Santa Rosa on Latinx Spaces published on May 27, 2021.
First of a series of audio recordings created by LAZO in collaboration with The Clemente | Intro by Alva Mooses:
Handmade paper, pages from an artist book in progress, 2021.
Cito, Longe, Tarde @ Haynes Project Chicago
The title of this exhibition translates to leave quickly, fly far, return slowly; it was a directive for citizens during infectious disease spreads in the Middle Ages.
Works in Cito, Longe, Tarde occupy an imaginary in which things like movement, human contact, or even safety might be understood differently. Through a dramaturgy of objects and images, it is a space for quiet reflection on lexicons of individual activity—physical and psychic—relative to the passage of time or collective body.
Haynes is a participant of the Chicago Gallery Open Sep 30–Oct 4, 2020, chicagogalleryopen.org
Installation views by Useful Art Services
Sin Eje/ Without Axis, 2020
Ceramic globe stands in progress.
Socrates Annual Fellowship 2019-20
se entra bailando / you enter dancing (2019) looks to the site of the Paricutín volcano in Michoacán, Mexico and consists in part of cement cast forms based on corn forms, sandals, candles, and other objects. Commissioned by the Socrates Annual Fellowship 2019; on view October 2019 - March 2020. Closing reception with dance by youth dance group from Michoacán, Mexico scheduled for March 29th, 2020.
Volcanic Charms | On-going ceramic series with volcanic glaze, 2020.
BUEN VIVIR/VIVIR BIEN
June 21, 2019 – August 25, 2019
The twentieth fourth edition of the Young Latinx Artists Exhibition explores the theme of buen vivir, presenting artists interested in decolonizing Western worldviews by tackling issues such as climate change, the legacies of colonization, immigration, and racism. As scholar Eduardo Gudynas has argued, buen vivir originally embraces a number of indigenous traditions in which the notion of well-being includes cohabitation with others and nature,opposing classical Western development. Buen vivir, or vivir bien has been deployed by a number of social movements across Latin America––from Quechua peoples of the Andes to Black Brazilian feminists––that are opposed to the inequalities brought by global capitalism. Latinx communities in the US and Latin Americans have shared histories of struggles and have been impacted by bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism, still, we find wisdom, action, and healing in the knowledges and experiences or our own diverse communities. Likewise, the artists in YLA24 offer us ways of dealing with the obscurities of our times, urging us to consider: what does it mean to radically live well?
Mexic-Arte Museum’s Young Latinx Artists 24’s guest curator, Tatiane Santa Rosa, is a Brazilian-born independent curator, art critic, and art historian. She is a 2018-19 Whitney Museum Independent Study Program fellow (Critical Studies), and a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She graduated in 2015 with an MFA from the Art Criticism and Writing program at the School of Visual Arts, and has an MA in Art History, Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. A Creative Director at AnnexB artist residency (NY), Tatiane has curated exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery, NARS Foundation, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Fundação Pró-Memória (Brazil), and ArteActual FLASCO (Ecuador). She was a curatorial intern at MoMA-NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art (Whitney Biennial team, 2013-2014), and El Museo del Barrio. Her essays and reviews have been published by Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, LatinxSpaces, ARTNews, Artcritical, Hyperallergic, and NewCityBrazil. Her essay on artist Joiri Minaya appeared in “The Matter of Photography in the Americas” exhibition catalogue, published by Stanford Press, 2018. From 2017 to 2018 she was a visiting faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute, California. She currently teaches at UC Santa Cruz and at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY-NY
Featured Artists; Carolina Caycedo (Los Angeles, CA), Mauricio Ortega Cortes (NYC, NY), Bel Falleiros (NYC/São Paulo, Brazil), Yareth Fernandez (Austin, TX), Joiri Minaya (NYC, NY), Alva Mooses (NYC, NY), Dalton Paula (Goiânia, Brazil), Angel Poyon (Comapala, Guatemala), Fernando Poyon(Comapala, Guatemala), Lina Puerta (NYC, NY), Ronny Quevedo(NYC, NY).
Artist-in-Residence @ The Loisaida Center 2019
Supported at its Ends—Hanging by its Weight
Co-curator of Supported at its Ends—Hanging by its Weight, an exhibition that brings together fourteen artists based throughout the Americas from New York City, to Mexico City, Argentina, and Chile. This exhibition is an inaugural event by LAZO, a platform developed by Alva Mooses & Claudia Cortinez as a resource and archive for contemporary artists of Latin American and Caribbean descent.
Smack Mellon Hot Picks
Whose Vestiges Subsist @ The Clemente | LES Gallery
Whose Vestiges Subsist brings together six artists working between the U.S. and their countries of origin: Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Chile. The title of the exhibition refers to Jean Baudrillard’s text, Simulacra and Simulation: “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.” Baudrillard recounts the story by Jorge Luis Borges in which imperial cartographers make a map so immense that it covers the entire empire at a one-to-one scale with the territory underlying it. When the map begins to fall apart, the citizens of the empire mourn its deterioration—the real becomes fragments of the map with the transformed territory that once lay below.
Throughout the Americas there is a continued struggle between colonial/neoliberal order and Indigenous cultures. Political and economic conflict continues to function as a catalyst for the movement of bodies, labor, and consumer goods. The exhibition pulls from a constellation of references that chart patterns drawn from a range of geographic and cultural contexts, such as pigeon races in Old Havana, the spiritual forces of a curandera (healer) in El Salvador, and the paths of hurricanes moving through Caribbean waters—haptic images that are factual and ethereal. Relics such as devalued currency, found wood, cheap plastic, waterfall lamps, and a pigeon egg, function as reminders of past sites.
The exhibition acknowledges the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center’s mission of fostering arts and culture amongst immigrant and local communities in New York City.
Participating artists: Esperanza Mayobre, Frances Gallardo, Carlos Jaramillo, Palo Cháán (Patricia Domínguez and Guadalupe Maravilla) and Òscar Moisés Díaz.
Curated by Alva Mooses & Florencia Escudero
The Clemente | LES Gallery | 107 Suffolk Street, 1st floor | NYC 10002
Retrato de un Paisaje
Retrato de un Paisaje | Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori | Buenos Aires
Retrato de un paisaje funciona como continuación y complemento de un proyecto iniciado con la exposición realizada en agosto de 2016 en el Shirley Fiterman Art Center de la ciudad de Nueva York, EE.UU.
Sobre la muestra por Claudia Cortínez
Los términos retrato y paisaje han llegado a definir no sólo los géneros más tradicionales del medio fotográfico, sino también los estándares de composición al ver o crear una imagen. Retrato de un Paisaje juega con estos formatos como convenciones a expandir, atravesando el límite entre imagen y objeto y la posibilidad de transformación de uno en otro.
La muestra reúne a 16 artistas de Nueva York y Buenos Aires que apelan al paisaje natural y urbano para indagar temas tales como la memoria, la identidad y la percepción, usando la fotografía como base de exploraciones técnicas y conceptuales centradas en la materialidad de la imagen.
En tiempos en los que reina la instantaneidad y la imagen fotográfica es sinónimo de intangibilidad y desapego, se presenta una perspectiva alternativa, volcada hacia la intimidad de la materia, permeable a las fuerzas en juego en el mundo físico.
Las fotografías pueden ser hechos, tanto como fantasmas o sombras. Las libertades que existen al momento de capturar la luz no dejan de evidenciar el entorno del cual proviene. Estas obras despliegan diversas manipulaciones, ya sean químicas, mecánicas o materiales, en función de reflejar el acto mismo de la percepción, la subjetividad de la memoria y la experiencia cíclica del tiempo.
La palabra Heimweh, que alude al deseo de proximidad a lo familiar, y Fernweh, acuñada por el romanticismo alemán para transmitir la idea de “ansia por lo lejano”, son también conceptos subyacentes. Las obras nos revelan geografías y recuerdos distantes, a menudo relacionados con lugares de origen o antecedentes sociopolíticos significativos, para traerlos insistentemente al presente. Estas urgencias emocionales se traducen en gestos más abstractos: el impulso de magnificar, enfocar y desenfocar infinitamente, de rastrear lo singular en lo múltiple.
Si el paisaje es una forma de ver, podemos asumir que sus posibles variables son tan infinitas como lo son las formas de mirar. Inevitablemente, el fondo afecta al primer plano - ¿Cómo disminuir esa distancia para volvernos participantes en vez de observadores? ¿Cómo se construyen identidad y lenguaje dentro de un paisaje?
La primera edición de esta exposición tuvo lugar en 2016 en la ciudad de Nueva York. Esta edición reúne al mismo grupo de artistas, profundizando la confluencia de estas ciudades a través de un nuevo diálogo entre sus producciones.
Artistas Buenos Aires:
Erica Bohm / Claudia Cortínez / Carolina Magnin / Samuel Lasso / Estefanía Landesmann / Ayelén Coccoz / Pedro Wainer / Rodrigo Alcon Quintanilha
Artistas Nueva York:
Esperanza Mayobre / Alva Mooses / James Hyde / Myeongsoo Kim / Barney Kulok / Libby Pratt / Martyna Szczena / Max Warsh
A Day's Dust
A Day’s Dust is a two person exhibition by Claudia Cortinez and Alva Mooses including new work produced in Stavanger, Norway. This exhibition was supported by Studio 17 in collaboration with Tou Trykk Grafisk Verksted.
Studio 17. Stavanger, Norway
Cornell M.F.A. Students in Mexico City
Cornell MFA Trip leader for visit to Mexico City with artists and curators, read more: Cornell AAP.