The Fate of Poetry: Alice Leora Briggs at Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe

by Michelle Kraft July 12, 2024
A gallery with sgraffito drawings hanging on the wall.

Installation view of “The Fate of Poetry”

“The fate of poetry,” declared Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott, “is to fall in love with the world, in spite of history.” It is this quote that provides the eponym for Alice Leora Briggs’ exhibition, The Fate of Poetry, now on view at Evoke Contemporary in Santa Fe. The show includes works in Briggs’ hallmark sgraffito technique, from such projects as her Abecedario de Juárez, a book co-authored with the late Julián Cardona. But there are more recent images as well: those that address school (and other mass) shootings, ruthless government policies (including those formally codified and those not, on both sides of the border), and caregiving for a century-old mother as she succumbs to dementia. In these latest works, Briggs turns her eye as much inward as she does outward. Viewed as a whole, the exhibition functions as a memento mori, a reminder of the tenuous veil separating life from death. Briggs avers that the overarching theme of her work has always been mortality; but her newer images, she says, “are an examination of my own history,” a study that she hopes yields larger meaning.

Installation view of “The Fate of Poetry”

To this end, Briggs’ work includes her characteristic references to the art of Northern European masters, such as Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein, and others. (Her chosen medium of sgraffito recalls their sixteenth-century engravings.) There are nods, as well, to seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting through her use of everyday objects to reference the ephemerality of human life. In Briggs’ case, though, the quotidian is juxtaposed against unspeakable violence. Hers is a (re)presentation so deadpan that it reifies the reality in Ciudad Juárez and along the border: such brutality is enmeshed into citizens’ daily existence. 

An Sgraffito drawing of a seated man.

Alice Leora Briggs, “No Enrranflados,” sgraffito and wood carving on panel, 43.75 x 25.5 inches

Medieval references are most apparent in her border-related imagery, such as some of the panels of the Estampas I series, or in No Enrranflados. In this latter work, the subject — a young man, unprotected by any gang or covert government affiliation — slumps seated in the foreground. Behind him crowd the contorted figures of acrobats in various attitudes of flight and suspension, bringing to mind the colgados, corpses hanged from the bridges and overpasses of Juárez. There are also scenes of Inquisition-style torture: men and women bound to wheels, racks, and dangling from hooks lodged into their backs. Their suffering echoes that of typical right-panel figures in Last Judgment altarpieces: the lost cast into hell and tortured by demons. Spanning the top of No Enrranflados is a predella, the panel that normally runs across the base of a Medieval altarpiece. Instead of a customary entombed body of Christ flanked by saints or angels, though, this predella depicts a decapitated corpse between two acrobats — a reminder of the fate awaiting those unfortunates undefended by any enrranflado.

Sgraffito drawings of vintage psotage stamps.

Alice Leora Briggs, “Estampas I,” sgraffito drawing and tinted gesso, 10 x 48 inches

In the Estampas I series, Briggs adopts the postage stamp as a recognizable motif: like currency, it is a government-issued document, characterized by its visual imagery, and is widely circulated and available to all. Here, she indicts the byzantine machinations of government (local and federal, both Mexican and U.S.) that oppress those without power. Examples include the panels of el montado (the ones accused of crime and held by police without evidence), la guerra (wars on drugs and between rival gangs), and la migra, which references the quota system mandated by the Immigration Act of 1924.

Alice Leora Briggs, “Massacre of the Innocents” mixed media, 13 x 33 inches

Briggs’ Massacre of the Innocents does not confine itself alone to the denunciation of federal inertia that enables the continued mass killings of children and other innocent victims. This work functions, rather, as a wail across time and continents, of “weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18). The title itself references the events surrounding the infancy of Christ, when Herod the Great, king of Judah, ordered the execution of all male children under two, a state-sanctioned genocide. In Massacre, Briggs alludes to both personal loss of loved ones, as well as to senseless acts of violence and oppression (often through government failure) in Uvalde, Santa Fe (Texas), Colorado, Afghanistan, Russia, Rwanda — the list goes on, reading as a survey of the mass killing of children from 1 AD to present.

Many of Briggs’ more recent works are inner-directed, chronicling a personal history of loss, death, and the universality of those aspects of the human condition. “I have begun to excavate my personal history to see how it will unfurl into imagery,” she recently explained to me, adding, “I’ve been on la frontera most of my life, not the one at the bottom of the United States and the top of Mexico, but at an extreme limit of understanding.” One example of this complicated personal anthropology is Fall, a large-scale piece depicting members of Briggs’ family seated around a table. Before them are the last vestiges of a meal consumed — plates of gnawed scraps and bones, even forelegs with hooves. There are bowls, glasses, flatware, all laid across the rich tapestry of a damask tablecloth. There is a fragility to these dinner artifacts, a transience that recollects the Dutch vanitas paintings. In the lower left is a lizard, another motif adopted by Dutch still-life artists, a reference to the serpent and original sin.  

Alice Leora Briggs, “Fall,” sgraffito with acrylic ink on panel, 24 x 36 inches

A feline lolls across one plate, the handle of a fork protruding from (under?) his head. It is easy to confuse the cat with the other postprandial detritus: Is this a pet stretched comfortably on the table, or is it part of the meal leavings? Briggs often uses animals, most notably cats and dogs, as surrogates for humans. One example of this is the mangy hounds in the left panel of her triptych La Familia, which represent “a ruthless world of political misanthropes and digitized hyperbole.” If this animal-as-human reference holds true in Fall, then the viewer comes away with an uneasy conception of cannibalism. 

Alice Leora Briggs, “La Familia,” sgraffito drawing and acrylic on panel, 17 x 62 inches

Behind the seated group is a devastated wasteland, the heaped ruins of buildings collapsed. Splintered frames, corrugated metal, tree branches, and bits of broken furniture hem the family in, though they themselves seem numb, oblivious to their confinement. Behind them, the single figure of a young man drops from the sky. His distress is evidenced in his splayed arms, hands, fingers, and in his silent, open-mouthed cry; we see him in the moment before his impact. The Fall is fallen humankind, it is Icarus plummeting to earth, it is Briggs’ own brother, lost to a fall from a cliff in the Tetons when she was seven. The seated figures in the scene are those of her father, her other brother, and the hand of her daughter, representing the pain of loss visited upon all generations. At an early age, Briggs was confronted by the deaths of many loved ones, recalling, “Our family had no words. We fell silent about all of these deaths for nearly sixty years.”

Installation view of “The Fate of Poetry”

Alice Briggs’ history mirrors that of all humanity throughout time — we all have lost loved ones, and we ourselves will die. And yet, there is a heroism and beauty in humble day-to-day living. “This work,” Briggs says of Fall, “is as much about living as it is about dying.” Our fate as humanity is the same as that assigned by Derek Walcott to the poets: we fall in love with the world and with life, though we are doomed to never survive it. This capacity for hope and beauty, amidst staggering grief, is a paradox that, too, binds us together. It is our shared experience as humans. As Walcott also noted, “I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.” 

 

The Fate of Poetry is on view at Evoke Contemporary (550 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe)  through July 20, 2024.

2 comments

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2 comments

Hills Snyder July 13, 2024 - 16:29

Well done! This piece and Alice’s show. And her talk the day after the opening.

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Julie Speed July 16, 2024 - 10:11

Alice Leora Briggs is a flat-out genius.

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