María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Julio César Morales
September 8-11, 2022, Javits Center, New York, NY 10001
Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present two artists at The Armory Show 2022. New work by María Magdalena Campos-Pons will appear in a solo booth in the Galleries section; a solo presentation of sculptural neon work by Julio César Morales will be featured in the Platform section, curated by Tobias Ostrander.
For the past two years, María Magdalena Campos-Pons has been walking daily through the magnolia grove on Vanderbilt University’s campus, a national arboretum in Nashville, TN. Along the way, she has been stopping to listen for the stories the trees might share, gathering buds and blossoms to photograph, draw, collage, and paint in her studio. As Campos-Pons imagines them, these magnolia trees contain a unique record of the complex history of the south and its centuries-old struggle with race and oppression. The result of her excursions is Secrets of the Magnolia Tree, an ongoing body of work that will consist of seven multimedia pieces.
Gallery Wendi Norris will exhibit three works from this series at The Armory Show 2022. The towering objects showcase Campos-Pons’ ingenuity in drawing, photography, painting, and printmaking. Leaning against the walls of the booth and presented vertically, like trees that are rooted into the ground, they rise up to reveal hybrid woman/owl creatures perching overhead, listening and whispering to the viewer. In Secrets of the Magnolia Tree. Deb Luminosity. (2022) Campos-Pons renders renowned artist and scholar, Deborah Willis, as a wise and luminous figure, an homage to both a friendship and her legacy.
Julio César Morales has long investigated issues on and around the US-Mexico border. Morales creates a narrative discourse through La línea that depicts the selective erasure of histories in the southwest United States, addressing how boundaries and land ownership have changed dramatically over hundreds of years. La línea consists of four simplified line drawings rendered as neon sculptures, re-writing the 1,954-mile border between the US and Mexico. "Línea” is a derogatory word Mexicans use to refer to the border wall.
The first sculpture represents the original boundary of 1640, before the arrival of Europeans, spanning from the Cocopa tribe in present-day California to the Karankawa tribe in present-day New Mexico. The second sculpture, La línea (1845), is based on the year before the Mexican-American war/Guerra de México y los Estados Unidos, when territories shifted significantly. The third piece, La línea (2022), represents the border today. The fourth in the series, La línea (2028), imagines a future border, following a civil war in the US that has left the states of California and New Mexico independent and with open borders to the south. La línea collapses time and space, centering the border as a main character in the histories of power, land, and colonial narratives.
The fair will take place from September 9-11, 2022.