Featured Artist: Postcommodity
Documentation: Yuula Benivolski
More Info: Art Gallery of York University
POSTCOMMODITY
Art Gallery of York University
Toronto, Ontario
January 11 – March 18, 2018
The USA-based collective Postcommodity (Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist) is known for large-scale, performative, and installation-based works that hyper-perform national limits. These works visually exaggerate borders and systems of control in order to emphasize their real and psychological presence. The two recent works exhibited at AGYU focus on border construction and contestation, permutation and movement and engage in discourses on redistribution, reconciliation, equity, and sovereignty as they pertain to the borders that extend from Mexico to the United States and to Canada.
A 360-degree continuum projected in a specially constructed enclosure, the immersive video installation A Very Long Line depicts the fence dividing the city of Douglas, Arizona, USA, and the town of Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico – an imposed borderline that also cleaves traditional Indigenous territories. The work acknowledges this disruption but also honours the Diaspora of trans-border families intertwined in the North American immigration system.
Daily Vice Interview
The two exhibited works are united in the gallery by a third, a new audio exploration that mimics sonic tactics utilized by the US Border agents to lure people through the landscape. Postcommodity’s sound installation leads us through the gallery spaces with voices that punctuate the darkness and beckon us to continue forward.
An interdisciplinary collective founded in 2007, Postcommodity is comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist. They are recipients of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014), Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (2017), and most recently The Ford Foundation¹s Art of Change Fellowship (2017). The collective has exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Contour the 5th Biennial of the Moving Image in Mechelen, Belgium; Nuit Blanche, Toronto; 18th Biennale of Sydney; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona; 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; Art in General, New York; documenta14, Athens and Kassel.
A Very Long Line, 2016 (excerpt)