Winter/Spring at moCa: a Look Ahead
Opening on Friday, January 24 are three exhibitions: Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature; Birthing Beautiful Communities: Dear; and (curated by MOCA’s recent hire, Curator and Deputy Director, DJ Hellerman) Harminder Judge: Bootstrap Paradox.
This is the first U.S. exhibition by British artist Harminder, whose vibrant plaster-and-pigment pieces merge painting and sculpture, embedding paint in form, making fields of sinuous lines and vibrant colors permeate the surface. The artist is influenced by funeral rites and ceremonial burning, and the large-scale objects–according to the exhibition statement–“provide a space for powerful responses while exploring the embodied connection between the physical and the spiritual.”Hellerman’s first curatorial endeavor at MOCA is centered on modern aesthetic experiments into form, which became the hallmark of American art made in New York after World War II. By 1960, artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Lewis created color field paintings in which pigments were applied to unprimed canvas, soaking in to the material, underscoring the flatness of the surface. Judge takes this approach, swapping canvas for plaster and a thin gauzy material (scrim), alchemically bringing color and line forth, ultimately creating contemporary friezes of form and brilliant color. Judge’s works, however, are heavy and slab-like, akin to the stones on which bodies are laid for mourning or burning. Situated before the slabs of heavy color, viewers ponder life, death, and existence. In the context of January 2025, the work is subtly political if interpreted as a cultural critique of death, unpondered, unexamined, especially when news of it comes in pandemical or genocidal waves over the propaganda machines we willingly always carry.
On the other end of things is Birthing Beautiful Communities: Dear, “a tribute to the strength, resilience, and beauty of Black motherhood and the community that supports it”. The exhibition, presented in partnership with the Cleveland non-profit Birthing Beautiful Communities, highlights the significance of the care and affirmation in their daily work, as well as the role community plays in raising babies and supporting mothers.
Multi-disciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim questions, “How knowledge is acquired and tests the potential for artworks and objects to function as meaning-makers outside of traditional museum contexts.” For A Hand in Nature, which originated at MCA Denver, Porras-Kim challenges museum and archival practices such as conservation, a practice centered on the idea that pieces of art or “precious” cultural objects must be kept pristine and untouched by the environments in which they are displayed or housed.
Porras-Kim employs processes of the natural world to make sculptures, paintings, and drawings that grow, change, or degrade during the exhibition. From sculptures rendered with salt-saturated concrete or copal resin wetted with local rainwater, to paintings created from slow drips of water, Porras-Kim’s artwork shows us what is possible when natural phenomena are “given agency to self-determine” in the gallery space, which is normally as pristine, quiet, and controlled as humanly possible.
The opening night celebration for all three exhibitions is Friday, January 24, 2025, from 6-9 p.m. and is free to all. Sign up here.
Quotes and paraphrased citations are from https://www.mocacleveland.org/exhibitions/ (accessed January 16, 2025).
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