Carlos Museum Winter Exhibits (wednesdays)

From the venue:

Maa Laxmi

 

::

::
In celebration of Diwali 2024, the Carlos Museum has installed Manjari Sharma’s large-scale photograph of the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity, Maa Laxmi in the Christian Humann Gallery of Asian Art. The work was purchased this year in honor of 2023 Woolford B. Baker Service Award Winner Ellen Gough and is a companion to Sharma’s Lord Vishnu, also in the collection. Both works are from the artist’s Darshan series, which was exhibited at the Carlos as part of the 2020 exhibition, Transcendent Deities of India: The Everyday Expression of the Divine.

The experience of darshan is considered reciprocal—a spiritual connection between a deity and devotee. Having moved to the U.S. from Mumbai to earn her BFA in photography, Sharma felt distanced from the rituals she had grown up with and began reexamining her relationship to her culture after a decade of being away. Challenging the traditional role of her medium, she sought to use the camera to “turn multidimensional memories of sculptures and ornamental paintings of gods into two-dimensional photographs.” By recreating the concept of a darshan in a contemporary setting and drawing parallels between the museum and the temple, Sharma asks the viewer to confront and contest the historic notions of preservation and presentation of Hindu deities. Returning to India to make these images, Sharma carefully selected models and a team of thirty-five Indian craftsmen who created props, sets, prosthetics, make-up, costumes, and jewelry to exacting specifications. The images are presented in deep and elaborately embossed hammered brass frames inspired by a temple-like setting.
Exhibit

Nicholas Galanin

For Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast such as Galanin (Tlingít and Unangax̂), the totem pole is a ceremonial object used to celebrate events, depict stories, and document family lineage. In I Think It Goes Like This (Gold), a seemingly Indigenous-made totem pole is covered in gold leaf but lies dismantled on the ground. Contrary to the viewers’ original understanding of the object, this is not a cultural tool of memory-making and community. It is a carving by an Indonesian artist created to sell as a souvenir to tourists in Alaska. Through his intervention of destruction and reassembly to the original carving and application of gold leaf, Galanin creates dialogue about the economy of cultural appropriation while reclaiming the work as Indigenous art. 

About the artist

Examining the complexities of contemporary Indigenous identity, culture, and representation, Nicholas Galanin works from his experience as a Tlingít and Unangax̂ artist. Embedding incisive observation and reflection into his oftentimes provocative work, he aims to redress the widespread misappropriation of Indigenous visual culture, the impact of colonialism, as well as collective amnesia. Galanin reclaims narrative and creative agency, while demonstrating contemporary Indigenous art as a continually evolving practice. As he describes: :My process of creation is a constant pursuit of freedom and vision for the present and future. I use my work to explore adaptation, resilience, survival, dream, memory, cultural resurgence, and connection and disconnection to the land.” Galanin unites both traditional and contemporary practices, creating a synthesis of elements in order to navigate “the politics of cultural representation.” Speaking through multiple visual, sonic, and tactile languages, his concepts determine his processes, which include sculpture, installation, photography, video, performance, and textile-based work. This contemporary practice builds upon an Indigenous artistic continuum while celebrating the culture and its people; Galanin contributes urgent criticality and vision through resonant and layered works.

Exhibit

Call and Response

 

Call and Response features five objects from five distinctive cultures, interpreted through a creative partnership between the museum and its communities, inviting collective consideration of how museum objects, invested with memory and meaning, “call” through time, inspiring subsequent generations who draw on them as sources of pride and communal affirmation—”responding,” reimagining and reinterpreting within a contemporary context.

A feature of the African American musical tradition, call and response is a participatory practice that engages the community in a melodic “conversation.” A musical phrase serves as a “call,” which is “answered” by a corresponding phrase—the repetitive process occurring at different intervals of the composition. This lyrical innovation, which traces its roots to Sub-Saharan Africa, serves as a creative reaffirmation of kinship and communal ties. Call and response is the organizing principle of this experimental exhibition that reconsiders the relationship between the museum and our communities.

Exhibit

Anonymous Fragments - Timothy Hull

Anonymous Fragments presents a new series of paintings and drawings by Timothy Hull inspired by the Carlos Museum’s collection of ancient Greek vase fragments. Piecing together histories of collecting, antiquities trafficking, and desire for Greek vases with images of same-sex lovers and Dionysian revelry excerpted from the vase fragments themselves, Anonymous Fragments (re)constructs a queer art history, grounded in antiquity, that offers a world in which bodies, identities, and desires are fluid, expansive, and playful. At the same time, examining the controversies of the trade in ancient Greek vases, Hull reminds us that all museum objects—the licit and the illicit—are out of context, and in this sense offer endless opportunities to be re-viewed and re-interpreted, accruing meaning across time and with every act of looking.

Exhibit