SANTA FE, NM.- SITE Santa Fe announced the new works and commissions and opening weekend programming for SITElines.2014: Unsettled Landscapes, the first edition of SITE Santa Fe’s new biennial series with a focus on contemporary art from the Americas opening July 20, 2014 and on view through January 15, 2015.
SITElines signifies a radical rethinking of SITE Santa Fe’s signature biennial exhibition, originally established in 1995. It represents a collaborative structure for planning biennials, a vision for continuity between biennials, a commitment to community and place, and a dedication to new and under recognized art. Unsettled Landscapes is the first exhibition in the SITElines series.
Unsettled Landscapes looks at the urgencies, political conditions, and historical narratives that inform the work of contemporary artists across the Americas. Through three themes—landscape, territory, and trade—this exhibition expresses the interconnections between representations of the land, movement across the land, and economies and resources derived from the land.
"Today, following the phase of intensive self-examination, SITE Santa Fe’s biennial has been transformed,” said Irene Hofmann, Phillips Director and Chief Curator of SITE Santa Fe. “It now looks to geography as a structural framework, to the history of New Mexico as an inspiration, and to the Americas as a vast territory for exploration. Leaving behind the official designation “SITE Santa Fe International Biennial,” this new exhibition series, SITElines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas, directs attention to the layers of history and culture embedded in Santa Fe, its surroundings and in relation to the entire Western Hemisphere.”
Unsettled Landscapes will include 45 artists and artists’ collaboratives from 16 countries. Of these works included in the exhibition, there will be 13 new commissions, large-scale installations, significant new works, and off-site projects.
“Rejecting the notion of homogeneity in the Americas, we recuperate multiple histories and cosmologies, looking to artists to help us reveal and understand points of view that have often been sidelined in the contemporary art world." said Irene Hofmann.
A selection of these new works include:
Jamison Chas Banks (b. Arkansas City, KS; lives in Santa Fe) will present a new installation that investigates the relationship between the Louisiana Purchase, Napoleon’s exile, the exile of the Cherokee in Oklahoma, and his own Cherokee/Cayuga-Seneca family history. A fictional baseball game between the “Exiles” and the “Purchasers,” becomes a central part of Banks’ installation and a metaphor for contested territory.
Andrea Bowers (b. Wilmington, OH; lives in Los Angeles) will present a new large-scale sculpture that memorializes a grove of oaks and sycamores that the artist, and four other activists, attempted to save from bulldozing in 2011.
Johanna Calle (b. Bogotá, Colombia; lives in Bogotá) has created a large-scale drawing for Unsettled Landscapes that represents the Ceiba trees native to Mesoamerica. The tree’s massive silhouette is drawn on blank notary sheets using typewritten texts from a variety of sources that refer to Colombia’s 2011 agrarian reform, the Ley de Vívtimas o Ley de Restitución (Law of Victims or Law of Land Restitution), which outlines the rights of victims of displacement.
Blue Curry’s (b. Nassau, Bahamas; lives in Nassau and London) new work features a live webcam feed of the harbor of Nassau, Bahamas that is focused on the tourist cruise ships that come into the harbor and transform the Bahamian landscape daily. In addition to this live feed that will be projected in the exhibition, a flagpole in front of SITE’s building will feature a changing combination of custom made flags that will announce the arrival of each new ship.
Gianfranco Foschino (b. Santiago, Chile; lives in Santiago) will present a new video installation that features footage shot from a small motorboat travelling through the Guaitecas and Chonos archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern Chile. With no beginning and no end, No Man’s Land takes viewers on an uninterrupted loop through this remote landscape.
Futurefarmers (founded and based in San Francisco) is currently developing a new project that engages New Mexico’s complex nuclear history and the “father of the atomic bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer. Their project is inspired by a series of curious memoranda sent from Dr. Oppenheimer’s office in 1943, requesting a nail be driven into the physicist’s wall. At the center of their new work for Unsettled Landscapes, Futurefarmers has processed and formed the simple nail using materials sourced from New Mexico.
