Grand Canyon: From Dreams to Memory

Grand Canyon: From Dreams to Memory

Exhibition
October 5, 2024 - December 28, 2024

Opening Reception with Artists
Saturday, October 19, 2024
1:00 - 3:00pm

This fall’s group show at Lisa Sette Gallery, Grand Canyon: From Dreams to Memory, considers Arizona’s site of deep time and vast transformation as experienced by dreamers, immigrants, and spirits passing through. With the fresh perspective of witnessing this wonder of the world for the first time, artworks included in the exhibit explore the profusion of meanings and implications that echo from the Grand Canyon’s fathomless depths. A public opening for the exhibition will take place on Saturday, October 19th, 2024 from 1:00-3:00pm with several artists in attendance.

Beyond the abstract boundaries of citizenship or residency, artists featured in Grand Canyon: From Dreams to Memory depict their experiences of this vast geological chasm through global backgrounds and diverse landscapes, from the new aesthetics of contemporary identity to timeless spiritual and planetary connections. Seven artists from six countries comprise the exhibition: Enrique Chagoya (Mexico), Tseng Kwong Chi (Hong Kong), Binh Danh (Vietnam), Carlos Estévez (Cuba), Siri Devi Khandavilli (India), Arno Rafael Minkkinen (Finland), and
Reynier Leyva Novo (Cuba).

Cuban artist Carlos Estévez was awarded an artists’ residency at the Grand Canyon Conservancy beginning on April 8, 2024, the date of a spectacular total solar eclipse. Estévez remarks: I perceived this astronomical phenomenon as a sign marking the beginning of my stay, and began a series titled "Intimate Eclipses," depicting imaginary eclipses in black and white. These were an introduction to the majesty and imposing presence of the new landscape surrounding me.

Focused on “a dialogue with nature and with myself,” Estévez’s enchanting ink and tempera drawings in the round depict mysteriously connected cosmic structures. Both in these mandala-like orbiting constructions and in his rectangular drawings, Estévez’s works chart the journey of human perception through the vast fields of time and space. The Grand Canyon appears as a temple to our spiritual passage in this world, and the artist a witness to the grand unfolding of the universe. The artist remarks: These works serve as testimony and documentation of my conversation with nature. Eclipses, temples, and dreams are the fundamental themes embodying my vision of the Grand Canyon.

Sculptor Siri Devi Khandavilli first saw the Grand Canyon when she was “about 15 days old in America,” after moving from Bangalore to Arizona to get married. She remarks: There is no not falling in love with the Grand Canyon. It is almost not earth-like when you see it for the first time.

Drawing on the Canyon’s vast geological document of change, and the transformational moment of experiencing it as a newcomer, Khandavilli portrays the Canyon as a source of spiritual reference and personal remaking; she parallels the beneficial, ego eating Hindu demon Kirtimukha, or goddess Vyali, often standing at Temple entrances to vanquish vanity, with the “liminal space of becoming and rebirth” represented by the Grand Canyon.

Presented in the mode of Hokusai’s 18th century landscape prints, Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, Khandavilli’s 36 woodcuts with bronze inlay combine different views of the Grand Canyon, imagery of the natural landscape in her home state of Bangalore, and a drawing of Vyali or Kirtimukha. A reference to her twin experiences of travel and marriage, each 9 x 12 inch woodcut is the size of a common kitchen cutting board. The artist comments: There are parallels between the liminal experience of entering a temple with Kirtimukha above, and how visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time also represents a transitional phase and space for me—of undoing my identity and rebuilding myself. I have incorporated overlapping drawings of fauna and flora in the Indian miniature style, showcasing Indian plants and trees. The distinctions in vegetation are stark when transitioning between different geographical regions, and it's something that always catches my eye whenever I relocate.

Tseng Kwong Chi, a prolific photographer who passed away of AIDS complications in 1990 at the age of 39, deftly portrays the immigrant feeling of being at a curious cultural remove, even in landscapes made familiar around the world through media exposure. Kwong Chi’s documenting of the Grand Canyon is both dreamy and slyly self-aware. The photographer inserts himself into the scenery dressed in a thrift store Mao suit, not as a wandering tourist in a postcard tableau but rather as a mischievous hidden figure, passing like a spirit through the shadowy, striated vistas. Viewers are challenged to find Kwong Chi’s humanity and sense of humor amid the mythic backgrounds, but once located, his aesthetic imprint impossible to forget.

Recently, the experimental photographer Binh Danh has traveled the country documenting National Parks in large-format daguerreotypes. Danh’s works capture dreamlike territories of the canyon and other idealized natural spaces, but rather than presenting an unchanging composition, the super reflective surfaces of Danh’s silvery images involve the viewers, centering their existence as a part of the landscape. Making daguerreotypes of the National Parks is a way to insert my viewers into this landscape as a form of citizenship, as if saying, “You belong here.” A visit to a National Park is something that anchors and roots us on this continent: a sense of belonging. For some, it's at the end of the immigrant experience to feel more American than ever.
 
Contemporary painter/printmaker Enrique Chagoya, who is concerned with the concepts of identity and myth as they morph throughout history and geographical location, finds the Grand Canyon a poignant background on which to stage a battle between good and evil, personified by his super strong “MayanAztec girl,” a recurring motif which blends Mexican and American patriotic iconography, about to land a blow on a neonazi, archetypal bad guy. Notions of a uniquely American landscape or character are complicated in Chagoya’s work, which is influenced by both current pop aesthetics and ancient Aztec traditions.

Each of the seven artists included in Grand Canyon: From Dreams to Memory, examine this magical site with such dualities in mind: the new and the past; the transcendent and the transitional; the spectacle of the cosmos and the experiences of humanity. Just as the state of Arizona has been made and remade by the cultures and individuals who have settled here over millennia, Grand Canyon: From Dreams to Memory represents a collective and radically multifaceted view. And similar to the newly minted United States citizens who are regularly sworn in at the Grand Canyon’s Mather Point Amphitheater, each of these artists brings the unique values of their background, culture, and media to the two billion year-old geological work in progress. Like America itself, the Grand Canyon is a place of profound distances and unexpected connections, expressed in diverse mediums and voices.

To request high resolution images, please contact us at (480) 990-7342 or email Ashley Rice Anderson at sette@lisasettegallery.com.
For 39 years, Lisa Sette has remained committed to discovering and exposing original, intriguing forms of expression. Lisa Sette Gallery exhibits painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and performance pieces from an impressive roster of emerging and established artists, as well as maintaining a clientele of local and international collectors devoted to its founder’s adventurous curatorial vision.