SOUTH BEND, IN.- The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art is presenting a solo exhibition with artist Clarissa Tossin, a native of Brazil living and working in Los Angeles. Clarissa Tossin: All That You Touch, You Change features moving-image, sculpture, drawing, weaving, and installation works. A highlight of the exhibition is the film installation Mojo'q che b'ixan ri ixkanulab / Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, which marks the first collaboration between Tossin and guest curator Jared Katz, former associate curator of the Americas and Africa at the Museum. The installation was recently featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial in New York.
Explore the powerful art of Clarissa Tossin! This first monograph offers a comprehensive look at her work exploring environmental destruction.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, which opens with the verses, “All that you touch / You change. / All that you Change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / Is Change.” The verses encapsulate Tossin’s belief in our capacity to influence Earth’s ecological future. Within this exhibition, the artist explores how legacies of colonialism lead to harmful appropriative practices, rampant consumption, and destruction of Earth’s life-sustaining biodiversity, as well as the attempted privatization of, and extraction from, sovereign celestial bodies. Working in diverse mediums, she cautions that we are already experiencing climate crisis.
Throughout Tossin’s work, she encourages people to join together to move away from our consumeristic behaviors in order to create lasting change. The exhibition brings together three bodies of Tossin’s work. The first comprises her reflections on Maya revival architecture, including two films—Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab / Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing and Ch’u Mayaa—as well as a series of sculptures on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art. She recontextualizes Maya revival buildings, an architectonic style realized primarily by United States-based architects who borrowed motifs from a variety of Mesoamerican cultures at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tossin’s work imbues these colonized spaces with performances inspired by ancient Maya musical instruments, depictions of dance, and contemporary Maya poetry to reclaim this contentious revivalist architecture for Maya-descendant communities.
The next body of work explores the impact of extraction and consumerism on the environment in works such as Encontro das Águas and Rising Temperature Casualty. Tossin places traditional Amazonian weaving practices in conversation with digital technology and consumeristic waste, primarily that of corporate Amazon delivery boxes and envelopes; she emphasize how this global corporation is harming the very environment and peoples after which it is named.
Finally, the artist considers the impact of expansionist and extractive colonial mentalities that are embedded in our approaches to the privatization of space exploration and mining. Works such as Maritime Arrivals, Future Geography, and new commissions by the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art address how celestial bodies are recognized as sovereign under international law and are sacred to many cultures worldwide. Tossin views current international space law insufficient to regulate private corporations, the very ones that are primary contributors to global climate change. Her exhibition reveals how legacies of colonialism continue to have a profound impact on people, the planet, and now, space.
This exhibition is organized by Jared Katz, former Associate Curator of the Americas and Africa at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, and is made possible by the Duncan Family Endowment, with additional support from the Kathleen and Richard Champlin Endowment, and the Friends of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, Charter membership.
Clarissa Tossin (b. 1973, Porto Alegre, Brazil; lives in Los Angeles) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2023), the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2022), and La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2021), among others. Her work has been exhibited in numerous notable group exhibitions, including at the Whitney Biennial, New York (2024); Prospect 6 Triennial, New Orleans (2024); Shanghai Biennale (2023); Chicago Architecture Biennial (2023); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); and the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A., Los Angeles (2014). She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including those from the Smithsonian Institute (2023), Graham Foundation (2020), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2019), Artadia (2018), and Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2017–18). Tossin’s work is included in permanent collections of major institutions throughout the United States and Brazil. Tossin holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, São Paulo, Brazil.
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