{"id":837557,"date":"2026-08-01T10:16:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T10:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/837557\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T10:16:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T10:16:29","slug":"the-formal-dictates-of-earthly-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/837557\/","title":{"rendered":"The Formal Dictates of Earthly Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

What if artistic innovation emerges from material itself, rather than being imposed on it?<\/p>\n

The components are simple: sod and a body. The grassy panels, laid carefully over a person underneath, begin to pulse. This is Ana Mendieta<\/a>\u2019s Grass Breathing (1974), part of a group of performances, recorded on video, that demonstrate the late Cuban artist\u2019s inventive approaches to her environment. Grass Breathing finds new company in this exhibition, which gathers contemporary, often Latinx or Indigenous American artists whose practices stretch Mendieta\u2019s ideas into the twenty-first century, enlivening unpredictable natural materials in similarly unconventional ways. Their grouping, an opening wall text declares, \u2018celebrates kinship through a shared aesthetic language rather than fostering an ethnographic gaze or a desire for cultural authenticity\u2019. Some unifying ideas emerge, particularly around nature\u2019s ephemerality and its formal dictates, but the divergent array of artworks on view eventually strays from the exhibition\u2019s compelling concerns.<\/p>\n

Din\u00e9 artist Raven Chacon<\/a>\u2019s aural composition Study for Vertical Earth (2026) fills the foyer: a thunderous, bass-heavy score, the result of underground microphones recording subtle earthly movements. Multiple artworks made using rocks, stone and sand greet the viewer upon entry, in turn highlighting the sanitisation of most institutional spaces. Edgar Calel<\/a>\u2019s room-size installation Ch\u2019ablin nu rayb\u2019el Chua taj ab\u2019ej (Splashes of My Desire on Top of Stones, 2026) stages local sandstone and lava boulders among mountains of brown dirt, each rock adorned with ceremonial offerings: dried flowers, eucalyptus and the artist\u2019s own oxidised blood. In the next gallery, Jackie Am\u00e9zquita further deconstructs the visual language of the museum: Cuerpos terrestres en fluidez (Terrestrial Bodies of Fluidity, 2025\u201326) features the destroyed remains of two monolithic, columnal sculptures, now broken into small bricks that resemble crushed pedestals, as though the museum itself were an ancient ruin.<\/p>\n

\"\"(left) Carmen Argote, an archetype of touch, 2025, avocado, cochineal and lemon juice on paper, 457 x 244 cm; (right) Carmen Argote, an archetype of stillness, 2026, avocado, cochineal and lemon juice on paper, 488 x 244 cm. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth Council, Los Angeles<\/p>\n

Others deviate less from Western artistic forms but use volatile, restrictive materials \u2013 often naturally derived ones native to the Americas. Carmen Argote, in an archetype of stillness (2026) and an archetype of touch (2025), has drawn gestural floor-to-ceiling depictions of human bodies using avocado mashed into an oily pigment \u2013 a substance that gradually destroys the paper beneath. Indigenous Amazonian artist Nereyda L\u00f3pez crafts strikingly emotive figurative sculptures from chambira palm tree branches; Ta+fe\/Sacharuna (2019) transforms one tapered frond into an indignant, hoop-earringed figure, its convex shape curving to form a chin, jaw and forehead. In some cases, an artist\u2019s unique materials are difficult to discern, but require subtle alterations to gallery display: Peruvian artist and cosmologist Santiago Yahuarcani applies colour extracted from local plants \u2013 similar in appearance to that of tempera or acrylic \u2013 to papery tree bark \u2018canvases\u2019 to make vivid narrative paintings that must be kept in low light to avoid damage (Bufeos robando mujeres en la fiesta del yacuche [Dolphins Abducting Women in the Festival of the Yacuche], 2022).<\/p>\n

\"\"Nereyda Lopez, Ta+fe \/ Sacharuna, 2019, vegetable fibers and wood, 95 x 40 x 40 cm. Courtesy collection of Michael Krichman and Carmen Cuenca<\/p>\n

Nature and climate change are recurring subjects, but not all works coherently engage these concerns at a formal level, particularly in later galleries. In Patricia Dominguez-Claro\u2019s Plant Saga installation (2026), dried roses scatter decoratively, and incomprehensibly, alongside watercolour drawings of women and military drones. Others employ clay in order to explore personal history and experience, but this material choice feels incidental: Naomi Gamarra\u2019s wall-hanging sculpture Mirando arriba (Looking Up, 2025) is an arched, decorative ceramic comb adorned with dangling clay lice, an eerie, if heavy-handed, exploration of ancient Peruvian bodily rituals and contemporary femininity that also feels out of place here. These works often deploy ancient ceramic techniques, but their methods have little influence on the results: Raven Halfmoon\u2019s adjacent Soku Sahyodahney\u2019ah (Caddo \u2013 Sun Twins, 2023) collages contemporary cultural signifiers with those of her Caddo Nation ancestry: two longhaired, conjoined ceramic figures \u2013 the \u2018Sun Twins\u2019 of Caddo origin stories \u2013 drip with graffitilike red and yellow colouring, the artist\u2019s \u2018tag\u2019 scrawled across the back of their shared torso.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most exciting about this exhibition is the idea that artistic innovation emerges from material itself, rather than being imposed on it \u2013 and that many sculptors, painters and ceramicists have long considered this challenge as more than a means to an end. But the energy present when I entered \u2013 lively chatter punctuated by Chacon\u2019s guttural music \u2013 was not palpable as I exited through its final rooms, which overflowed with artworks that diverged from the exhibition\u2019s earlier focus on material into explorations of identity instead. At best, Several Eternities vocalises the radical \u2018shared aesthetic language\u2019 of a growing force in contemporary art, but too often its inclusions dissolve into illegible survey.<\/p>\n

Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 5 April \u2013 23 August<\/a><\/p>\n

Claudia Ross<\/a>Reviews<\/a>July 31, 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What if artistic innovation emerges from material itself, rather than being imposed on it? The components are simple:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-837557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}