SEATTLE, WA.- The Henry Art Gallery is presenting Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, the first major United States solo exhibition of work by this influential Chilean-born artist. It traces the artists career-long commitment to exploring discarded and displaced materials, peoples, and landscapes in a time of global climate change.
Working within the overlapping discourses of conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices, Vicuña has long refused categorical distinctions, operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile. The exhibition includes sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and text-based work from Vicuñas practice since the late 1960s, weaving together the artists many artistic disciplines as well as communities with shared relationships to the land and sea. The works evoke the ephemeral qualities of the landscape and reframe dematerialization as more than a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism but as a consequence of radical climate change as welland in both casesas a process that shapes public memory and responsibility.
Included in the exhibition is a large selection of Vicuñas precario sculptures produced over the last four decades that feature found objects in lyrical juxtaposition, as well as a recent, monumental structure created out of scavenged materials from the ever-diminishing Louisiana coast. Also on view will be the installation Burnt Quipu (2018), in which lengths of dyed wool hang floor to ceiling connecting earth and sky in commemoration of environs harmed by human activity. Burnt Quipu is part of Vicuñas longstanding artistic exploration of the ancient Andean writing tradition of talking knots, a sophisticated communication system repressed during colonization.
Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) has lived between her native country of Chile and the United States since 1980. A poet, visual artist, and filmmaker, Vicuña is the author of more than twenty books, and exhibits and performs internationally. She is also the cofounder of oysi.org, a site for oral culture and poetries of the world.