Death Rights

Death Rights presents creators engaging with death, loss, remembrance, and the afterlife, experimentally reclaiming and exploring death, memory and grief from political, spiritual, and radical perspectives. Death Rights brings together a breadth of artists to radically reshape our relationship to death.

These engagements with death range from intimate interrogations of personal loss to broader examinations of cultural, political, and societal relationships to death, grief, and memory. Several included works were created as direct response to the loss of a loved one, using the creative practice to process the experience, both in the immediate and in the years to follow. In Nine Strata, Angel Lartigue displays components of an altar created in the home of a friend she’d just lost. Depicting biomaterial samples gathered from the deceased’s collection of Pre-Columbian art, the altar banner connects the nine stages of corporal decomposition and the nine levels in the journey to the Aztec underworld after death, exploring the body’s relationship to the earth and ancestral traditions.

Ingrid Syage Tremblay’s Texture of Fall is a creative vehicle for processing the death of the artist’s father. The work examines the cycle of life and decay in nature, reframing the texture of grief as a background in our lives while we continue to go about the rest of our days.

Heather Renee Russ began working with algae after the death of her brother from gun violence. Throughout her algae work, spots of blue represent attempts to heal from gun violence. Algae Tears for Jon Jon explores the complexity of grieving murder: relying on the same police department for ‘justice’ that had harmed her brother for walking while Black and looking for healing through an abolitionist perspective in support systems geared towards vengeance. Culturing and maintaining algae became a comforting outlet for Russ, meditating on algae as life-giving, providing more than half of the air we breathe.

Angela Guerra Walley’s installations All The Ways Your Loved Ones Are Preparing You For Their Absence and We Are Quilted Together likewise honor departed family members, while also meditating on the artist’s relationship to family legacy. All The Ways Your Loved Ones Are Preparing You For Their Absence features items inherited from family. Quilted and installed on a bookshelf, Guerra Walley’s grandmother’s house dress honors the memory of her grandmother, who lived with Alzheimer’s. Nearby, the artist’s partner’s quilted wedding suit evokes weddings and burial rituals. Dried flowers collected from loved ones and the artist’s Day of the Dead altars live in plant pots from plants she couldn’t keep alive, an examination of her ability to be as capable a caretaker as her grandmother was for ten children. Exploration of the artist’s relationship to past generations continues in We Are Quilted Together, which honors Guerra Walley’s lineage of women makers and uses quilting to piece together understandings of different aspects of her identity. Strung on her grandmother’s clothesline, the homemade dresses are taken apart and quilted back together, now unwearable. They simultaneously evoke the dresses and quilts her grandmother made for their family, and provide a vehicle for Guerra Walley to process her relationship to her gender-fluid and Queer identity, and her choice not to have children.

Other exhibiting artists confront the ways specific communities relate to death, grief, and generational memory, and how those communities’ relationships to death can be affected by various systems of power and oppression. In current socio-political landscapes, who is afforded space to live well, die well, grieve well, and be remembered? Who isn’t, and who and what systems does that benefit?

In Adriana Corral’s Untitled (Campo Algodón series), documents are repeatedly transferred onto gessobord until they become obscured. These classified court documents relate to the 2001 violent murders of eight girls in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Anthropologist Cecilia Balli noted “These acts of violence..transpire daily, at all hours... But they disappear into tiny, irrelevant newsprint, if they register in the public record and the public consciousness at all.” The artist’s technique of repeatedly transferring text from primary source documents onto the surface by rubbing the back of paper with acetone allows a physical, repetitive practice resulting in a reminder to the viewer of the repetition and erasure of these crimes and an obvious hidden truth in plain sight.

Joe Harjo’s practice confronts misrepresentation, appropriation, and lack of visibility of Native culture in the U.S. Honor and Loss in the Time of Cultural Appropriation evokes life cycles, seasons, and regeneration of life and earth after periods of death. Stereotypically-patterned Pendleton beach towels with appropriated Native symbolism are housed in memorial flag cases, symbolizing “putting to rest” the contents, containing, controlling, and ending the stereotype. In his Indian with Covid prints, Harjo continues his series of performance prints documenting his daily contemporary Native life. While the broader series pushes against Native stereotypes by pointing to universal aspects of contemporary social identity, these works engage with specific Native experiences of Covid-19 and generational trauma. Native communities have been disproportionately hard-hit by the pandemic, one piece of the multi-layered aftershocks of violent colonization and multigenerational systemic racism.

Influenced by The Ghost Ship warehouse fire (which killed 36, many of whom were LGBTQ+), the Pulse nightclub shooting, and gentrification, Heather Renee Russ’ Tidewrack holds space for Queer celebration and collaboration, while also grieving the tenuous and temporal quality of Queer safety and community. Russ meditates on how gentrification and closure of Queer spaces pushes LGBTQ+ communities into unsafe spaces. Tidewrack focuses on New York’s Riis Beach, recognizing the importance of Queer beaches, as indoor Queer spaces close and shift. These beaches provide a place where Queer and trans people can inhabit their bodies in nature, though they are also under threat from climate change and development.

Angel Lartigue similarly explores the precarity of Queer space and existence in Operation Psychopomp. Lartigue’s practice is informed by her experience in decompositional research working on research ‘body farms’, where bodies donated to science are studied as they decompose. In Operation Psychopomp, Lartigue recreated an archaeological site on a dancefloor while wearing a garment of sealed petri dishes handled with her gloves from forensic work, creating a psychopomp ritual of defiant Queer and trans survival in the face of death. Seeing the fluidity of matter and land and body as “an inseparable ecological unit”, as the artist put it, “I will wear death before I get killed.” Together with Nine Strata, the works show a complex range of human interaction with death, from personal loss, grief, and honor to defiant resilience and analytical scientific removal.

As Lartigue draws on certain religious traditions and rites in her works, so do other exhibiting artists, their engagement with death and grief processed through interest in understanding, subverting, and reconfiguring the rites, objects, and narratives of religious traditions. With a creative body of work centering self taught spiritual practices, Gabriel Chalfin-Piney performs a feeding ritual, exploring how we join the systems and people we encounter before and after loss, with a family recipe honoring the shared birthday of Chalfin- Piney’s father and death anniversary of Chalfin-Piney’s grandmother. Their sculptural masks adapt forms from Jewish memorial plaques hung on death anniversaries. Originally made as interpretive aids for Jewish folktales, they now follow the Anti-Zionist diasporic concept of Doikayt, translated from Yiddish as “hereness,” trapped in rest by flavor and scent of baked-in spices.

In Iliria Osum’s Mater Mortis and r|Anchor|us, a tapestry encases a game where visitors explore experiences of a medieval anchoress and a Queer youth trapped in a bad household. Anchoresses were Medieval Christian figures who undertook a funeral-like religious rite, after which they were ‘dead’ to society, leading isolated lives of prayer. In these parallels, the figure of death becomes a motherly, transcendent escape, rather than a void or uncertainty to be feared. The work examines the limited options available to Queer people at certain times and places, as isolation and lack of power drive each character to derive power and comfort from the only thing they have agency over - their own death. Like many Queer people, the characters reuse and refigure the symbols of power used against them, because the worldviews available to them don’t allow space for their true existence.

Andy Salstrom’s playful, irreverent toys also display a demystified and reshaped relationship to death. Designed to resemble versions of different popular childrens’ toys, they invite us to interrogate the taboo around death in family-oriented media and conversations and the way we communicate about death and loss intergenerationally.

Finally, several included works examine death through memory, past and future legacies, and the politics of who gets to be remembered. Evan Paul English uses tattooing to explore cycles of cultural memory and the particular way deceased marginalized artists’ legacies can go through cycles of erasure and ‘rediscovery’. 19th century Scottish artist Frances Macdonald, while having a strong creative influence on her peers and on 20th century design, is less well known than her male collaborators or even her artist sister, largely because her collaborator and husband Herbert MacNair destroyed much of her work upon her death. In Gathering, visitors receive a tattoo based on Macdonald’s work on their heel, where the design eventually rubs off. Mirroring fashions of art historical discourse, visitors participate in reinvigorating and again losing the memory of an artist.

Shifting considerations of posthumous creative identity into the future, in Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Kameron Neal’s Pillow Talk, a young Queer couple candidly and jokingly discuss death and artistic legacy in the age of the internet and evolving media topographies. In the context of a cultural landscape and canon often adversarial towards Queer creators of color, Pillow Talk’s visions of future creative renown provide a bright light of effortless certainty and joy.

Together, these artists present a thoughtful and multi- faceted exploration of our rights, as humans, to interact with death in an abundant, creative, and healing way - rights that too often are taken from us (by capitalist forces, governments, and other systems of power), or that we forget to remember to use. 


Marian Casey
Open Call Exhibition
© apexart 2024