Genius Loci

Featuring Michael Assiff, Ragini Bhow, Kevin Brisco Jr., Dominic Chambers, Danielle De Jesus, José de Jesús Rodríguez, Alfredo Diaz, Azza El Siddique, Lizette Hernández, Jonathan Herrera Soto, Melissa Joseph, Calvin Kim, Saskia Krafft, Naomi Nakazato, Roksana Pirouzmand, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Emma Safir, and Lulu Varona

Charles Moffett is pleased to present a group exhibition Genius Loci, featuring the work of eighteen artists from around the world. Within the practice of landscape architecture, unraveling genius loci—the unique spirit or character of a place—requires patience and close observation. The process involves a sensitivity to seeing and understanding how the different material and immaterial elements of a site harmonize with one another to make it memorable. Curated by José Chavez Verduzco, an Assistant Director at Charles Moffett and prior student of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the group exhibition Genius Loci emerged out of this practical and academic concept, but with the understanding that artists, as opposed to landscape architects, are better equipped to engage with and depict the essence of place.

For thousands of years, long before genius loci emerged as a framework for the profession of landscape architecture, artists have been portraying the spirit and essence of the spaces they admire, cherish, and imagine — from the depiction of the hazardous nightly journey of the sun god through the Netherworld on the Egyptian Sarcophagus of Wennefer, to the illusionistic garden frescoes on the walls of the Roman Villa of Livia, to the beauty and hardship of a Northern European winter in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow. A contemporaneous survey of the notion of genius loci, this exhibition encompasses artworks that capture places both terrestrial and otherworldly, tangible and intangible, showcasing the artists’ materially rich and diverse responses to the cultural, ecological, historic, and spiritual character of the environments that surround them. As stated by Chavez-Verduzco: “By bringing this group of artists together, the exhibition centers the ways in which their respective environments have become embedded in their psyches, and how much later, through the process of translation via their artistic medium of choice, we are invited to see these environments through each individuals’ subjective lens.” Presented at both of Charles Moffett’s Tribeca locations, the ground floor of 431 Washington Street and the second floor of 437 Washington Street, the exhibition is organized into three thematic groupings: Kinship, Biotic + Abiotic, and Reconstructions.

Kinship
Showcasing artists whose practices are deeply rooted in and responsive to the places from which they emerged, the Kinship portion of the exhibition explores themes of connection and disconnection from one’s home, the gaps between notions of home and homeland in diasporic life, and contentions with identity as a byproduct of displacement via war, gentrification, migration, and climate change. A St. Louis-born, New Haven-based painter and writer, Dominic Chambers is interested in how art can function as a mode for understanding, recontextualizing, or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world. Drawing inspiration from literature, particularly Magical Realism and the writings of W.E.B. Dubois, and engaging in art historical models, such as color-field painting, Chambers explores memory’s impact on place, as demonstrated in his painting on view in this exhibition — a recollection of his childhood classroom in St. Louis awash in a hue of hazy yellow. A Nuyorican painter and photographer born and raised in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Danielle De Jesus’s works tell the story of growing up in New York City amidst gentrification and displacement. Her painting here conjures the tension found throughout her practice via the juxtaposing of seemingly conflicting identities, power structures, and places. A New York-based artist raised in an Indian/American household in rural Pennsylvania, Melissa Joseph’s practice is an endless consideration of how bodies that identify as women of color are permitted to occupy space. In conversation with painting yet made from textiles and other craft materials, Joseph’s compositions translate memories and images from her family’s archive to capture her rural American upbringing, her extended family in India, and her present diasporic life. An Iranian multidisciplinary artist now living and working in Los Angeles, Roksana Pirouzmand’s artistic interest focuses on the interaction between the human body as a receiver/viewer and as an activator/performer. Through her performance and sculptural practice, the artist navigates her migration from Iran and sustained connection to it through her extended family. For the work featured here, the imagery comes from an old photograph of her mother and great uncle, over which she uses glaze to obscure and conceal different aspects of the portraits like memories imperfectly recalled.

Biotic + Abiotic
This section of the exhibition explores the dichotomies within our ecosystems, particularly the divide between the biotic (living - humans, animals, plants, etc.) and abiotic (non-living, water, dirt, air, etc.) elements that comprise the environments in which we live. The artists and works featured here conflate and complicate these seemingly straightforward distinctions in their approaches and representations of place. From Bangalore, India, New York-based artist Ragini Bhow invokes a trance-like state where visions and dreams intuitively guide the formation of her abstract paintings. The resulting cosmology consciously decenters human notions of temporal space in order to transport us to another world where past and present might coexist. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Alfredo Diaz identifies as an indigenous person with roots in Oaxaca, Mexico and his work oscillates between culture and time, examining how objects can go from functional to artifact due to colonization. Almost indexical in nature, Diaz’s recent works poetically transport the viewer to a place between Oaxaca and South Central, stamping the urban signifier of concrete to create materially rich geometric paintings that invoke the urban environment he grew up in. Known for large-scale sculptural environments, Sudanese-born, New Haven-based multidisciplinary artist Azza El Siddique combines steel and ceramic sculptures with ephemeral matter to explore ritual, mortality, and memorialization. Created in a posthumous collaboration with her brother, artist Teto Elsiddique who passed away in 2017, the artwork featured here, One washes the other, is a simultaneous working through of grief and act of reverence, in a tender, potent collapse of this world and the afterlife. Virginia born, Brooklyn-based Japanese-American artist Naomi Nakazato’s interdisciplinary practice surveys the conglomerate landscape of memory, language, and the artificial authenticity of the biracial experience. Navigating digital and analog boundaries, Brackish, Arborescent Fields Make for a Good Home (Koseki) depicts family registry documents and oysters—both representative of her lineage and father’s current home in Japan. The tag which hangs in the bottom left corresponds to virtual site visits of Japan on Google Street View and the zones that are blurred and obscured within it—a privileged mechanism that exists purely within the digital realm. Born and raised in Los Angeles, artist Lizette Hernandez creates ceramic works that investigate the notion of sacred objects. Engaging with clay’s inherent connection to memory through human touch, the artist’s sculptures mark her processing and healing of traumas and events experienced in her daily life and her broad Latin American migrant community. Born in Chicago to undocumented parents, originally from Iguala, Mexico, Jonathan Herrera Soto is the first US citizen in his immediate family and has spent his life in an in-between worlds, straddling permissibility and illegitimacy, Spanish and English, citizen and refugee. Through his printmaking practice, Soto centers historically marginalized bodies and discarded objects, imbuing them with new life and celebrating their marginality through transformation. Born in Los Angeles, artist Esteban Ramón Pérez draws upon his Chicanx cultural upbringing to create paintings and sculptural objects made from stitched-together pieces of scrap leather and suede. Building on his experience as a professional upholsterer to render concentric, radiating abstractions and outlined human forms, his works interrogate and excavate his subjective memory, spirituality, and fragmented history.

Reconstructions
The final section of the exhibition brings together artists whose practices mine memories, dreams and archives as a foundational underpinning of their work. Queens, New York-based artist Michael Assiff’s new paintings are based on a long-haul trucking trip he took last year across the U.S. with a childhood friend. While on the road, Assiff photographed countless plant species and his newest works are informed by his extensive archive of the native and invasive plants he encountered. The works explore the migration and growth of plants along man made vectors such as trucks stops, highways, and similarly industrialized sites. Born in Memphis and now based in Brooklyn, Kevin Brisco Jr. works across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. The floral motifs of his painting featured in this exhibition continue the artist’s urge to question our perceptions of nature, use and ownership of land, and ongoing forced migration. Originally from Canyon Country, California and a recent MFA graduate of Columbia University, Calvin Kim makes paintings and sculptures that explore tenuous relationships between naming, knowing, and feeling. By looking at the mundane and its entanglement with the celestial, his paintings often use transformation, softness, and stillness as an emotive stance for the rupturing condition of everyday life with hope and wonder. José de Jesus Rodríguez’s paintings place family photos, Catholic imagery, and Chicanx iconography into surreal but convincing landscapes that examine how personal narratives are created and challenge oversimplified and singular definitions of identity. Drawing upon recollections of his childhood in Salinas, California, Rodríguez’s vivid colors and complex compositions suggest the lucid strangeness of memories and dreams and explores the alchemical ways in which we shape our personal stories. Born in Germany and now based in Los Angeles, California, Saskia Krafft’s artworks consist of layers of glazed ceramics, translucent fabrics, and plasma-cut, painted steel. Inspired by her travels, experiences in nature, and search for what creates a sense of home, she uses her work to reconstruct impressions of places she feels connected to while also unifying them with psychological self-portraits, collapsing places and personal memories into singular compositions. Born and based in New York, Emma Safir makes paintings that utilize fabric manipulation, lens–based media, smocking, rasterization, upholstery, and digitization. Drawing on personal photographs, she collages those visual elements together with her unique upholstery, embroidery and smocking techniques to explore hierarchies of labor in relation to gender and digitization. Lulu Varona lives and works between New York City and her native Puerto Rico. Applying embroidery techniques she learned from her grandmother as a child, Varona makes works addressing the contemporary social and climatic conditions of Puerto Rico.