INCA: 2 West Roy St. Seattle, WA, 98110
Exhibition: 25 February – 1 April
Opening: 25 February 3-6pm
Reading: 25 February 5pm
Curated by Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas
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Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s exhibition Mouther at INCA is made out of four films transferred to video: Matrulla, Otros usos, Post-military cinema and Black Beach.
The artist will do a reading during the opening.
Mouther
What i now find more curious about these works, are not the original reasons or motivations for aiming the camera, but the accidental aspects of the films. In Matrulla, it is the way Pablo Díaz Cuadrado, a rearguard visionary, farmer and thinker— moves, smiles, sings—the way he speaks and holds a root. Who would have guessed that his favorite song was about a Syrian lover! In Otros usos the object-like image of the geography of Vieques folds like paper, and trembles. I had meant for the image to be still but I was holding the mirrors in front of the camera with my hands. The warmth of the light comes through the trees in the main hall of a movie theater in a military base. This simple cinema makes the forest, rather than a projected film, visible. Charlie, in Black Beach performs a daily ritual, banging rocks together rhythmically, dragging palm fronds, speaking to the waves. I feel connected to him. We think with the senses in parallel ways, and are both wiling to follow some ideas intuitively, sensorially, until they begin speaking, signifying, meaning. What continues to interest me about photography and cinema is that it is an art rooted in the materials and sensory perception of the world, in the register of the real. It is rich in accidents, uncontrollable, expansive. Of my own work, these are the films I understand the least.
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Santiago Muñoz’s recent work has been concerned with post-military land, Haitian poetics, and speculative futures. Recent exhibitions include: Song, Strategy, Sign at the New Museum, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, Post-Military Cinema, Glasgow International; The Black Cave, Gasworks, London. She is a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Visual Arts Award and USA Fellowship. She is also co-founder of Beta-Local, an arts organization in San Juan, Puerto Rico.