ALVA MOOSES

(Be)Longing
February 19 – March 27, 2022
Opening Sunday, February 20

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. 

The paintings by Jesus Benavente, confront themselves by means of splattered paint, contrasting color, and reactive acrylic on a disturbed surface. Their physical state prompts texts that describe moments of protest. Each statement is prescribed as a political stance and/or a self-identifier. Jesus describes these as miracles that are in-between coraje and sentido. Exemplified in the painting “You Live Here Now” which declares a moment of transition that shifts and scars our notion of home that may happen unwillingly or willingly. 

The installation, “How do you say Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in Quechua?”, by Carlos Jiménez Cahua, reveals a translucent text of the menicent reality of political policy. Words that translate without meaning and translanguaging through the migration of Indigenous communities to the United States. The displacement that is nested from a colonized perspective then an imperial perspective and finally as an im(migrant).

In the work, “thuñi, ruinas, ruins” the sculptural fragments are brick, vaguely placing their likeness among the decay of the urban landscape. The bricks are carefully crafted as polygonal shapes sourced and studied from the Andean region. The forms trace what was once made by hands of Incan stonemasons but here Carlos’ bricks stand in form and spirit aching to connect structures and lives from Turtle Island to Abya Yala.

Through the exhibit a sequence of nostalgic markers, words and forms become objects. In the works by Bonam Kim, she gives us placement and distance of her own journey through objects that bear her memory and body. The staged suitcase, “The Story of a Stranger”, holds miniatures of her artwork, as an archive of her past, as she im(migrated) from Seoul to her present time in the United States. These precious objects create a middle point for nostalgia. In the bone-like structure, “Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down“ her own legs and body recalculates her own lengths and size, translating space from metric to imperial measurements tracing the similarities of home through the body and the new space. 

Finally, transcending from object to paper the works by Alva Mooses finds repose for body, memory, and land. You Enter Dancing/ There’s Always Sign, uses hydraulic pressure for the impressions on the ochre and charcoal mud color textured papers. The forms of a shoe sole and a corn cob overlay, emerging and receding. Along with the concrete casts they result in the traces of human presence that track across land –Alva refers to the practice of disguising foot tracks. Although referencing the paths that im(migrants) take across the Mexican/US border the imprints seem to remember the traces of footsteps across continents of the peoples fed by corn for a milenia.

Jesus Benavente is an amazing and attractive visual artist. Jesus Benavente earned an MFA from the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Jesus Benavente is a 2021-2022 Smack Mellon Artist in Residence and a Chinati Foundation 2022 artist in residence. Recent exhibitions and performances include, Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; LTD Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Performa 13, NY; Acre Projects, Chicago, IL; Find & Form Space, Boston, MA; Chashama, NY; Shin Museum of Art, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Kingston Sculpture Biennial, Kingston, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY and Austin Museum of Art, TX, among others. Born in San Antonio, TX, Jesus Benavente lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. San Anto es donde está mi corazón.

Carlos Jiménez Cahua, born in Lima, Peru, is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City. He makes work about American Indigeniety with a focus on that of the Andean region. He is a member of Rimay Raiz, a group that organizes events and publishes narratives around Andean culture and the Andean diaspora. 

Bonam Kim is a sculptor based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA and MFA degree from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea. In 2016, she completed her second MFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She was featured as an emerging artist from DongBangYoGae, Art in Culture magazine in Seoul. Also, she has participated in the residency program at Trestle Art Space in Brooklyn, NY and awarded the Stutzman Family Foundation Graduate Fellowship for her residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. She has completed a three-month residency at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY and the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. She has exhibited work at NARS Foundation, SOHO 20, The Korean Cultural Center, Super Dutchess Gallery, Denise Bibro Fine Art, among others. 

Alva Mooses received her MFA from Yale University and BFA from The Cooper Union. Recent exhibitions include Space Coiled Like A Serpent (LES Print Shop, NYC), You Enter Dancing/ There’s Always Sign (The Clemente Center, NYC), Cito, Longe, Tarde, (Haynes Project, Chicago), Se Entra Bailando (Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC), Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien (Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, Texas), Retrato de un Paisaje (Museo Sívori, Buenos Aires, Argentina), A Day’s Dust (Studio17, Stavanger, Norway), and Internalized Borders (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, NYC). She has completed residencies at The Center for Book Arts, LES Print Shop, and The Clemente Center in NYC, The University of Chicago, Columbia College, Tou Trykk in Stavanger, Norway, and the Davidoff Art Initiative in the Dominican Republic, among others.

This exhibition is Cecile Chong’s curatorial debut with Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York alongside invited co-curator Eva Mayhabal Davis. 

You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign is a collaborative installation by Alva Mooses and Mauricio Cortes on view at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center Inc. in March of 2021 Drawing from their on-going research on sign systems that subvert colonial enterprises, Mooses' and Cortes' installation raises questions of belonging, movements and immigration, presence and absence. 

You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign features four correlated pieces. The exhibition's centerpiece is a sandbox, an octagonal wooden structure filled with sand that visitors can enter into and move around. The sand registers the visitors' footsteps: markings accumulate, layer over layer, producing an abstraction––a history of the presence of bodies and their fleeting activities. Alva also shows eighteen handmade paper works from an on-going series with imprints of forms that resemble shoe soles or corn texture. The marks in the paper are made using hydraulic pressure yet they are subtly visible, as if the impressions had been made by an ethereal being, not by bodies' weight.

On Studio 406 classroom's large chalkboard, Alva and Mauricio wrote the Spanish words "YO NO SOY TU" (In English, "I AM NOT YOU") dozens of times with an automatic drawing machine. The mechanical repetition of the phrase can be understood in direct response to immigrants' struggle in the US and alludes to the classroom practice of repetition as punishment. The amalgamation of written patterns on the chalkboard could be interpreted as another iteration of the multiple, overlapping footsteps in the sandbox. 

Another component of the installation is four abstract ceramic sculptures, Sin Eje/Without Axis, 2019/2020, which Mooses created in collaboration with Cortes. The pieces are inspired by empty globe stands devoid of the worlds. The structures' deformed arms look like they had been melted or can resemble a sort of trap. On the one hand, their distortion may be seen as an absence of movement or, perhaps, this deformation could refer to cartography as one of the control mechanisms of coloniality. 

Coloniality represented by the immigration's struggle is not the only condition that You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign seeks to transform and critique. The classroom space, not that unlike the border’s, has become a crumbling space, a site of liminality between presence and absence. The artists also draw links between the sandbox and the classroom, two sites that have been re-signified because of the pandemic. Classrooms have become suspended in time, latent of in-person relationships between students and instructors. The sandbox can be seen as a marker for the sociability void hovering around young children. 

One can also imagine a connection between Mooses' drawings and the sandbox through the signs that they both hold: footsteps. If understood within the context of immigration, Mooses’ drawings evoke the vulnerability of immigrants' bodies seeking asylum or simply the chance for a new life. 

You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign is a response to the old-yet-new colonial desire for demise. It is also an invitation for regeneration and recognition of life's impermanence, its fleeting nature. If a new world must emerge out of these multiple emergencies, perhaps it is possible to envision renewed spaces of education and nurturing, open and built to embrace free movements and play of children, especially for those who came walking towards a new world.

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, The Center for Book Arts, Gap Tooth Studio, Werk Fabrication, and The Clemente.

Mezcales de Leyenda has generously donated mezcal for the event on April 2nd.