Nomen Ambiguum, solo exhibition
May 18 2024 to July 27 2024
Niagara Artists Centre
Gold’s radiance is alluring. The veins of mountainous areas continue to drain and the “green gold” that enticed colonial botanists has rolled into the production of monoculture farming for our present-day appetite. Through site-specific installations, amate/amatl (Mesoamerican tree bark paper) drawings, and paintings, the work in this exhibition speaks back to monumentality, architectural structures as empire coding, relentless extraction, transculturation and burned histories by way of aesthetic strategies that collapse the past, present, and future. This work is framed with the concept of the brown commons or what the late Cuban-American scholar, José Esteban Muñoz, would define as people, flora, objects and more that “suffer and strive together,” yet have an “ability to flourish under duress and pressure.” (José Esteban Muñoz, 2). This brownness is a stain to the whiteness of the walls. And brownness persists and resists.
Reference List
Muñoz, José Esteban, Joshua Chambers-Letson, and Tavia Nyong’o. The Sense of Brown. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Documentation by Jimmy Limit
https://nac.org/nomen-ambiguum-michelle-peraza/
