Material Histories: Talking with Molly Everett

When Resonant Earth opened at the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston, I had attended the press preview and found the work unique in its poetic approaches to abstraction and the inventiveness of its material manipulation. After returning for another visit, I talked with curator Molly Everett to get a detailed account of the unique forms and critical thinking on display.

Gabriel Martinez (GM): Tell me about some of the themes that led you to conceive of Resonant Earth and why you wanted to work with these artists for the show.

Molly Everett (ME): Resonant Earth explores the connection between the human body and the land, these intertwined social material histories that are embedded in the land — very specific ecologies, both local to Houston and further afield. It’s also about being embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems and how we have this global presence. The show attempts to touch on the local and the global and think through those interconnections.

There are six artists: Kelly Akashi, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Lisa Alvarado, Andrea Chung, Sky Hopinka, and Anna Mayer. They are each engaging these questions with their practice in very unique ways and through a variety of media — from video to installations, ceramics, painting, sculpture, and photography. Their different material forms reflect these questions conceptually. It felt timely to do this show because of the ongoing climate catastrophe. I was thinking about the exploitation of the Earth’s resources, Houston’s impact on the climate, and the intergenerational trauma this causes. These themes drove the selection of the artists and vice versa. It felt like a natural grouping to put these artists together but also to allow them to have distinct spaces within the exhibition. 

GM: Something that really interests me about the show is that the artists are using such distinct materials and approaches. I wonder if you want to talk about some of the material innovations that distinguish them?

ME: It’s exciting to think about how each artist has such a distinct approach to material, and that, in part, drove the layout of the show. There are no walls in the exhibition, but I tried to create a space for each artist to have their own world. It’s very noticeable in Kelly Akashi’s work. She’s someone who works with installation, but actually started as a photographer. She talked about moving from analog photography to installation because she’s thinking about expanding beyond the frame. 

Akashi’s interested in cultural, geological, and alchemical processes that embody time and memory. This is reflected in her photos that employ crystallography and contain fine traces of crystalline structures. The images document moments of transformation and look like the cosmos or an embryonic goo. Throughout her work she’s playing with scale, both in terms of time and the body. 

The other group of photographs are from her Witness series that are tied to her exploration of her family’s history at a Japanese American incarceration camp in Poston, Arizona, where her father was imprisoned during World War II. The photos feature trees and she was interested in how these plants bear witness to these histories. Relatedly, her bronze sculpture, Conjoined Tumbleweeds, was cast from two plants that were growing entwined at the same site. Her work considers how generations are enmeshed in these histories and places. Another sculpture in the show, Inheritance features a crystal cast of Akashi’s own hand holding a stone from Poston and adorned with family jewelry. She explores memory and intergenerational trauma in the body and how they’re interconnected but also intangible. Her work is so tactile in a way, but then it also has this reference to the ephemeral with regards to the passing of time and the impermanence of the body.

GM: I love Sky Hopinka’s work. I’ve seen a handful of his films. I think these two pieces, Jáaji Approx. (2015) and Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), are very emblematic of his filmmaking. Can you expand on them a bit? 

ME: Hopinka’s work is invested in histories of language and personal connections to land, myth, and place, specifically with regard to Indigenous homelands and languages, which he addresses through rhythmic and poetic gestures. It’s so effective because his work expresses some of these intangible or difficult-to-articulate connections we have with the land. In the videos, he’s interweaving these scattered and reassembled landscapes with layers of captured audio and poetic text and music, while considering the spiritual implications of colonial plunder. In Jáaji Approx. he’s in dialogue with his father about these generational connections to place and land. I think it’s beautifully representative of his practice, which is so concise yet evocative at the same time.

GM: They’re gorgeous to look at and there’s a poiesis there that opens up how you’re interpreting what you’re looking at. I love the bridge sequence — you’re crossing over into another place, and he’s abstracted the suspension cables so they emerge from darkness as eruptions of light and line. Around the corner is Lisa Alvarado’s work. Tell me about her installation.

ME: It was inspiring to work with Alvarado. She’s originally from San Antonio, now based in Chicago, and she was in Houston for the opening weekend playing with her band, Natural Information Society, in the gallery, surrounded by her work. She describes the free-hanging paintings as “vibrational maps and reminders of invisible states.” She explores a relationship between geography and the body in the face of border restrictions and environmental devastation.

Her family is from the U.S.-Mexico border and she’s interested in histories of migrant farm labor, the Chicano civil rights movement, and Chicano muralists. It was a great opportunity to work with Alvarado on commissioning a site-specific wall mural for the Moody. She made this incredibly encompassing piece that addresses in-between spaces and the concept of Nepantla.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio also considers different traditional indigenous beliefs. For instance, he’s interested in the Ceiba tree, which in Mayan culture connects the sky, the Earth, and the underworld. He sees every material that he uses as embedded in these social, cultural, and economic networks. 

The works on view are all from Aparicio’s Caucho series, which are made from castings of trees in Los Angeles. He was born in LA, but his family is from El Salvador. He casts non-native ficus trees, which were planted throughout LA in the ’50s. They have big, beautiful canopies, but they also have massive buttress root systems that have broken up the sidewalks and streets. The city went around and removed them, particularly from lower-income neighborhoods. Around the same time Central American migrant workers were deported en masse. 

So, prior to the trees being cut down Aparicio would dress up as a city worker and cast these trees in rubber, which is, of course, made from the sap of another non-native tree. He speaks about these twinned histories of plants and people and how the histories are embedded in these sites now. He covers the other side of the tree castings with discarded clothing and incorporates painted representations of highway signs, to create an archive of Central American neighborhoods in LA, where he grew up. He talks about it as an archive of lived experience. One of the pieces in the show Libre De Fósforo Blanco (W. Washington Blvd and Hoover St., LA, CA, USA) has shards of green glass around the edges. The glass is a reference to the bombing of the forest with phosphorus in El Salvador during the war. It caused all the trees to drop their leaves, exposing where the guerillas were encamped in the forest. He’s thinking about this violence and the related shedding of the leaves, but also how people will use broken glass as a security mechanism and put them at the top of a concrete wall.

GM: They’re really stunning and the glass is amazing. Walking around those pieces you can see that the rubber cast picked up names and words carved into the trees.

It was nice to spend time in Andrea’s dome, The Westerlies: Prevailing the Winds.

ME: Chung has done a lot of research around star charts and colonial maps, which would often include depictions of sea monsters as cautionary illustrations to European colonialists. The maps were designed from a Western perspective and she wanted to invert that. She was thinking speculatively about navigation and different forecasting techniques and how indigenous people might have built their own type of map. 

Throughout her practice Chung has focused on island nations and the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean, and in The Westerlies: Prevailing the Winds, she was exploring a context in which people indigenous to that region might receive warnings from the sea or the sky of imminent colonial danger. She invites the viewer to step into the dome and understand the ocean and the sky as both an enclosure and an expanse. There are also three collage pieces, The Load is Heavy, and My Back is Tired I, II, and IV (all 2023) that are tied to her interest in early photographic history of the Caribbean. They incorporate reproductions of late 19th century ethnographic photographs, of African women, specifically in Jamaica. They point to Chung’s investment and long-time concern with the visibility of labor.

The photographs are adorned with flowers and intricate beadwork with ceremonial significance and importance within the black diaspora. The women are somewhat covered with flowers, some of which are tropical. Some, however, are not native and reference colonial histories, like the roses. Different flowers are integrated amongst them, protecting the women, but also bearing down on them. The collages are placed on top of birthing cloth. They are referencing midwifery, labor, and the role of women in the Caribbean.

GM: I really like seeing her work. I’ve known it for a while, but this may be the first time I’ve gotten to see it in person, and it’s important to see it in person.

ME: Yeah, I agree. She was born in New Jersey, but she grew up in Sugar Land, and this is her first time showing her work in Houston.

GM: Speaking of Houston, tell me about Anna Mayer’s work.

ME: She really knocked it out of the park. In her two site-specific installations for the entrance gallery, she took the question seriously. Mayer addresses the engagement between the land and body through her ceramics. Mayer is very much interested in petroculture (the politics and culture of society’s dependence on oil). She’s been engaged with these social and material questions throughout her practice and works with what she calls “gleaned clay,” which is what she finds as a byproduct of other processes such as drought, flooding, and construction. 

The wall-based installation, Working Past the Ocular (Does the Subsurface Need to be Spoken For?) considers how tools function as extensions of the body and are used to excavate the Earth. The ceramic sculptures reference pairs of eyes, pairs of hands, and pairs of feet. They’re displayed on photographic wallpaper that depicts damp cement, which appears like water is seeping up from the ground into the gallery.

Mayer’s other site-specific work, Second Body, features large-scale ceramic vessels and black innertubes, coiled like intestines, installed on top of a table with chairs around it. The work is positioned amongst existing Moody furniture to underscore their corporeal presence and how viewer’s bodies interact with the space. In both installations, Mayer incorporates gleaned clay from the area, including Houston and Marfa. You can see she’s using these different, very traditional firing techniques and thinking about the transformation of material as well. 

GM: Both of those pieces are striking. It’s a fantastic entrance to the show. There’s a restraint in her process and her installation, which I think does the work justice.

ME: Mayer’s such a thoughtful artist. She made two incredible installations featuring all new work that are subtle and monumental at the same time, while engaging land and materials in the region locally. It sets the tone for the rest of the show. It immediately introduces the viewer to some of the questions at play in ways both haptic and explicit. 

It was inspiring to work with these artists and their diverse approaches to these questions. I think they’re important questions to keep asking and to keep engaging with, particularly in this moment of climate catastrophe and ongoing social and political struggles tied to the land and social justice.

GM: What is next for you and what are you looking forward to?

ME: I recently moved to LA to start working at David Kordansky Gallery. I’m excited to work with a really incredible roster of artists and to explore a new city, learning (and sometimes getting lost!) in LA.

 

Resonant Earth is on view at the Moody Center for the Arts through August 17.