Groundworkby Sydney Acosta, Teresa Baker, Moira Bateman, Liz Ensz, Hannah Lee Hall, Alexa Horochowski, Kahlil Robert Irving, Seitu Jones, Stephanie Lindquist, Gudrun Lock, SaraNoa Mark, Ana Mendieta, Alva Mooses, Ryan Gerald Nelson, Nikki Praus, Ian Tweedy, Mathew Zefeldt

Dreamsong is pleased to present Groundwork, a group exhibition taking terra firma as both subject and medium. A wellspring of enlivening nutrients, a signifier of territory and identity and a site of conflict over indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. From a material standpoint, earth immediately invokes the monumental Land Art tradition of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer, however, the artists in Groundwork eschew the romanticized grandeur of ‘empty’ Western spaces in favor of considered excavations of locally embedded and lived histories. Adopting anticolonial, queer, feminist, environmentalist, and other critical lenses, they seek communion with the specificities and spiritual meanings of place, burrow into the legacies and experiences of their ancestors, and express concerns about our collective future. Their poetic interventions into land center diasporic experiences, treat the ground as a repository of ancestral time and memory, and lament the historically entwined damage wrought by colonialism and resource extraction. More attuned with the groundbreaking work of Ana Mendieta, whose film Untitled: Silueta Series (Gunpowder Works) (1980) is included in the exhibition, earth is treated in Groundwork as an invaluable storehouse of oft overlooked heritages.