Leaf 6
The Sight of Something Vanishing
David Horvitz, Guillermo Galindo, Na-Mira, Pablo Romero, Korakrit Amenanodchai, Max Hooper Schneider [The Shidoni Foundry, Upper and Lower Levels, La Finquita, Tesuque, N.M.]
On a Fall monsoon day, David Horvitz’s memorial installation, “Flock of Wingless Birds, ” cuts the rain with thousands of shimmering marbles housing bits of soil . The stained carpet on which this ocean of glass rolls [when stirred by a wayward foot] matches the sombre mood of rural Tesuque’s La Finquita—a decaying metal foundry, contemporary art gallery, and small -farm project rooted amid the leafless orchards and yellowing aspens some seven miles North of Santa Fe.
Between 1942 and 1946, at the crossroads of today’s Casa Solana neighborhood, stood a Detention and Internment Camp confining over 4500 Japanese resident aliens. To commemorate each immigrant, the artist—a descendant of this infamy-- gathered grains of sand from the adjacent river bed. Crossing the haphazardly flung orbs to enter the next room, the visitor must perilously slip and slide between their uncontrollable movements-- just as the incarcerated men groped their way through psychic disorientation and
omnipresent risk. San Francisco’s Nitten Nishida— Buddhist archbishop of that city’s Nichiren Howke Temple—is remembered by a poignant felt hat. Worn during imprisonment in this federal facility, it is the sole personal object interrupting the surrounding white walls.
Crossing the threshold to view Guillermo Gallindo’s “In Darkness” reprises this theme of heedless loss in a monumental, room-filling assemblage. Transparency is replaced by opacity. Composed of interwoven charred branches, trellised burnt twigs, carbonized boles resembling deformed masks, the odd singed coccyx or sacrum, and broken sheep jawbones : all are remnants of the 2024 fire that swept across the Northern New Mexico Sierra Blanca range. This installation, lit from above and rising from an emblematic bed of charcoal, refers to the mountains and myths sacred to the Nde people. Yet from this stark aerial basketry [resulting from the “valley of fires”], a resurrecting shadow projection, suggestive of regrowth, is cast on the back wall.
On the side wall, Galindo paints a large, colorful mural ironically repurposing Picasso’s chiaroscuro memorial, Guernica [1937], honoring the revolutionaries who died in the Spanish Civil War. Picasso’s powerful black, white, and gray elegy, in praise of resistance, is transformed into plaster-paled red, ochre, green, and blue icons. The Spanish painter’s all-seeing eye remains central and watchful but sardonic substitutions—from three Smokey Bears to the conquistator, Juan de Onate, from raven to Georgia O’Keefe—filter laterally through the blackened remains.
This sieving of the revisionist mural through Nature’s ruined woodwork, plus the substitution of Spanish motifs by the legends of Native Peoples and Lands , constitutes a profound reworking and rethinking of Franco’s despoiled Spain from the perspective of local Indian culture.
Gallindo is also a composer and as one circles the piece we hear his second installation, “If It was Ever to be Used,” the sound emitted from a third room. Using vibration frequencies, he arouses Nature’s shamanistic forces in the world. This accompaniment provides an audible healing to the projected images of 1960’s decommissioned missile silos placed in and around Roswell, New Mexico, and the Western Plains States to deter the Soviet Union after the Cold War. This Documentary—narrated by Galindo’s flat, uninflected voice--enfolds shimmering white deserts, rusting metal cylinders, wrecked pipes or funnels, vibrationally-sensitive crib systems, decaying machinery, thick doors, concrete crew quarters-- not lyrical green forests—to announce a new kind of cataclysmic burning, a Nuclear Conflagration.
Trudging down the muddy dirt path to the lower level and Foundry, the visitor encounters Pablo Romero’s inquiry into that time-honored institution of stewardship, the mayordomo. This almost extinct manager of New Mexico’s acequias or community ditches, dams, gates has the diplomatic task of distributing water in the parched Southwest. From the visibly- managed order of Embudo’s ancient 1778 acequia, we jump to the cacophony of Los Angeles artist Na-Mira’s Marquee. In this video and sound installation, the resurrection of dusty media appears to be the aim. The crackle of a defunct South Korean radio station alerts us to the change of mood
as do the niches broken into the lower wall, and the old- fashioned red film strips whose alternating Korean/English titles are reflected upside -down in floor and wall mirrors. Out-of-datedness also characterizes three Director’s Clipboards and an empty Deco movie theater.
Easy to overlook because it blends into the factory ‘s unlit, dismantled setting, Max Hooper Schneider appropriates one of the Foundry’s abandoned electroplating vats. This large, ominous cylinder holds a preposterous plush monkey submerged in an acid bath. Given all the metal piping, the visitor only glimpses, as it were, through glassy peepholes as the artificial fur of this toy “specimen” grows slivery copper dendrites and thus “greens” in a laboratory jar.
This theme of vanishing turns into a lament in the twenty -some scrims plus light projector installation in the adjoining long gallery. As We Fall [2024] throws wavering photographic images of a group of tribal women climbing the peaks of the legendary Throne of Solomon Mountains in the Punjab on the Pakistani border, close to the Indus River. Shown repeatedly, these faded figures disappear repeatedly. Uzbeki filmmaker, Saodat Ismailova, visually explores the geographically -divided history of Central Asian women. The scintillant, dissolving –as if raining—quality of the blue/silver projection as it dapples the large rectangular space speaks to her own fragmented experience. Cascading flashes streaking the walls and liquifying the foundry floor collude to give a sense of that time of cultural and national unravelling when the Soviet Union was collapsing and local customs and values were undone.
Bankok artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s smoke and vapor installation continues the theme of history as slippery as water and time as an ineffable infinity. His literally -choking sensory multimedia installation, “Nostalgia for Unity” [2025] fills a large,hallucinogenic stage consumed by the boundless smoke after the burning of Zozobra. Soil, house paint, acrylic emulsion, haze, and a programmed audio and light system heighten the fiery fumes. At the crescendo, the floor cracks and the smoke dies in an orgasm of whistles, howls, synthetic sound, and blinking overhead light. The moment splits open into cosmic apocalypse.