Dust to Lust

Curated by Grace Storey

Isabel Baptista’s painting La Fortuna depicts the artist counting money. The work is a way for Baptisa to create a safe refuge for herself with a dash of superstition, maybe the money will reproduce and keep coming. Mischievous and unapologetic, Bapitista often paints self-portraits and captures intimate moments of queerness in everyday life. She is currently interested in the history of her native Venezuela and American South  and the role that spirituality plays in carrying its culture and histories across borders as tools for copying and survival.  

La Fortuna is made of a drawing in ink and acrylic medium on paper that has been mounted onto a wooden panel and covered with acid-free glue to varnish the image. Baptista’s unconventional combination of media is consistent with her rejection of prescriptive rules and regulations. 

Sam Chun will be presenting a galvanized steel chainmail wall sculpture that explores the oscillation between opposing entities; Amulet (Long Live, Live Long), 2021 is 32 by 65 inches. Chun investigates the philosophical and cultural conflicts between Eastern and Western perspectives. He is interested in synthesizing the two to forge a new perspective, neither ‘this’ nor ‘that’ but a liminal space that eschews categorization. Whereas the concept of duality exists in the west with opposing forces (good vs evil, light vs dark) vying for superiority, in eastern philosophy, opposites coexist with and for each other. The goal is balance, starting with the self and branching out to the family unit, the community and then the nation. 

Amulet was made at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccines were still in development, and the idea of waiting for protection against something invisible weighed heavily. Amulets, or talismans, have been used to ward off intangible threats or welcome good fortune. Shamanism is the native Korean belief system; its current form incorporates Buddhism and Taoism. Shamanistic practices use of amulets to help individuals with aspects of their life from success in business, studies or love life, to warding off disease or even avoiding lawsuits. Amulets make hopes and desires tangible, its power is only given to those who believe in them. Chun explains, ‘I think we can all empathize with the feeling of helplessness and the desire to see or touch a tangible symbol that implies that everything is going to be okay.’

Kenny Dunkan’s presents a video from an ongoing series which explores a different movement of the body in various contexts or rituals, and traces the artist’s connections between body, spirit, and place. PAY DAY shows Dunkan’s feet being washed by the sea, his ankles wearing perforated Euros as beads, alluding both to shackles and to Carnival attire.

 Dunkan’s practice-is influenced by his upbringing in Guadeloupe and its multiform Caribbean culture, which itself synthesizes a mix of influences from African history and colonialism. The ideas of nature and culture, history and present, oppression and resistance, violence and protection, intimacy and vulnerability, the sacred, and the mundane, are folded into his work. Juggling assimilation and otherness, his treatment of identity is not simplistic or linear, but rather a complex accumulation of ideologies, cultures, and collective and personal experiences.

The body is integral to Dunkan's artworks. Images of his body serve as a map, an index of his own experience of knowledge transfer and historical transmission. 

Elissa Medina presents a kinetic sculpture involving a pair of ceramic Mexican Colima dogs, who could conceivably be mating, playing, fighting or dancing. Reminiscent of a pre-Columbian artefact, the canines are placed on a plinth covered by an acrylic hood, in a display reminiscent of an anthropology museum. The sculptures spout glitter at intervals, which gradually fills the box that contains them and buries the artifact.

Medina’s practice explores the appropriation of Mexican tradition by Western culture. Her works subvert the rituals and symbols of her Mexican upbringing in order to exorcise their power and reclaim them on her own terms.

In Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. [When she woke up, the dinosaur was still there], Medina highlights the ubiquitous presence of a “primary gaze”, a reductive, one-dimensionsal reading which flattens anything outside the norm, which as Legacy Russel explains, is “given little room to occupy and even less territory to explore”. By referencing a historic artefact, the artist refuses to comply with such characterization. The obvious pimping up of the artefact is wishful of change of history itself, using joy and celebration as tools for liberation and acts of resistance. Her works retain a truth to the Mexican environment, she explains, ‘somehow we are still dancing’.