Since the abrupt closure of the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas, has a lot less gallery space for visual art. Luckily for the community and for students at West Texas A&M University , the university gallery in Mary Moody Northern Hall has an absolute stunner of a show that provides some respite from — and resistance to — our current zeitgeist of anxiety and loss.
Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum closure notice
Installation shot of “A Mountain of My Making”
A Mountain of My Making, curated by Leslie Moody Castro, features video works from four artists hailing from Mexico City. Within the compact space, interspersed between hanging curtains and color-changing lights, are four monitors and three projections. The slightly transparent curtains create discrete spaces within the gallery, while the lights offer a feeling of fluidity, flux, and flow. Each screen and projection plays the entire catalogue of videos in an unsynchronized manner. I wasn’t able to ascertain whether each runs in a loop or at random, but I found myself wandering among the screens, following threads throughout the space and seeing echoes and glimpses between them. While it had the potential to be disorienting, it was mesmerizing, like floating down a river of sound and color.
Installation view of “A Mountain of My Making”
As I flowed through the exhibition, associations formed between the content and context of the videos and the sculptural elements. Virginia Colwell’s The Neykia (2021) shows interiors — curtains, houseplants, mirrors — while speaking of dreams and memories. Julieta Gil’s digitally rendered floral amalgamations rotate through space, revealing hidden contours and stretched, distorted forms. Also by Gil, a 3D rendering of the graffitied Monumento de la Independencia in Mexico City, or the Angel of Independence, similarly rotates through space, with digital lacunae opening up around it, gaping and black. Miguel Ángel Salazar and Carlos Iván Hernández’s alien creatures — fossils from a primordial past or future ecosystem — move through digital landscapes of waves and sand dunes.
Work by Julieta Gil in “A Mountain of My Making”
“A Mountain of My Making is … the story of building a haven and a small universe in a moment of chaos to rest and watch the world pass by,” Moody Castro writes in the curatorial statement. She cites events in recent memory that have irrevocably changed and shaped reality — the pandemic, the resultant “return to nature after a period of isolation,” protests against systemic violence — and gestures toward the future and the “new creation of life.”
It is true that we are living through a great reordering. This exhibition offers spaces to reflect on these major shifts. What will we evolve into? Colwell’s The Neykia, produced during the second wave of the pandemic, reflects on loss, both personal and societal. It looks inward, to memories and archives. On the other hand, Gil’s monument, drone-documented and 3D-modeled following the feminist uprising in Mexico in August 2019, broadcasts outward and is accompanied by the echoing sounds of protesting voices. The eruptions of graffiti across the face of the edifice speak to promises broken and progress suppressed: “no hay justicia” (there is no justice); “ni una más” (not one more); “se va a caer” (it will fall). The angel at the top of the monument is conspicuously missing.
How do we ascribe value to the collective endeavor that is art? I drove up to Canyon to see this exhibition, but also to commiserate with my fellow cultural workers on the sudden loss of their museum space, a turn of events that took everyone by surprise. By virtue of reviewing this exhibition in a regional art outlet, my words here are adding value to the show, the venue, the curator, and the artists. But how do we demonstrate the actual value of art? By its ability to collect and present different points of view for others to experience? And how do we demonstrate the loss, the lack, when a space for collecting and presenting other points of view is suddenly ripped away?
Installation view of “A Mountain of My Making”
The monument covered in graffiti from Gil’s video, titled Se va a caer (2020), shows viewers in Canyon something conspicuously lacking in Texas, and, increasingly, throughout the United States — public space taken over by public expression. This commons, exploding with outrage, becomes a symbol. We are living in a time of brutal repression of such expressions, and even our small “havens” of art are disappearing or are under threat.
A Mountain of My Making is on view through May 3, 2025, at Dord Fitz Gallery at WTAMU in Canyon.
