"My work is a reaction to our present moment—a time of fierce acceleration and disembodiment, of fleeting memory and distorted consciousness. The goal of my work is to scar the viewer’s memory, to bring them back to the present moment by triggering their senses with a textural language."
Donna Huanca
Donna Huanca studio by Billie Clarken courtesy of © Peres Projects
Donna Huanca studio by Billie Clarken courtesy of © Peres Projects
Donna Huanca studio by Billie Clarken courtesy of © Peres Projects
For the exhibition SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH), Donna Huanca (b. 1980, Chicago) presents an extraction of primal sensory signals that proliferate in a new landscape full of reflections. Comprised of a new body of paintings, sculpture, olfactory, and sound works, the site-specific installation will be activated by a series of live performances, each one unique and specially commissioned for the occasion.
Imbued with multiple temporalities, Huanca’s paintings are derived from her durational performances. Using past performance documentation as the foundation for her subsequent exhibitions and works, Huanca captures ephemeral moments to construct an ongoing narrative within her larger body of work.
Although otherworldly and surreal in appearance, Huanca’s vibrant color palette and materials used in the installation are drawn from nature and are incorporated into a new topography. This play with our senses and preconceptions is further carried out in Huanca’s layering of textures and surfaces, disrupting our perception of image, medium, and body.
During each performance held throughout SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH), painted performers, adorned with Huanca’s textural language, will leave their traces onto the installation, reflecting an evolutionary mark-making that is constitutive of Huanca’s densely layered work. With the exhibition’s title, Huanca melds the body and the landscape in a linked process of change. Just as an earthquake leaves a lasting rupture, scars are renderings of history, maps of encounters. Like memories inscribed in flesh, scars connect us to specific spaces and times.
Abounding in sensory information, Huanca’s work interrupts vision and memory and will be ever-changing throughout the eight-month duration. The artist has said that she aims to leave a small scar on the retina, a lasting impression that remains with the viewer in an otherwise transient world.
Donna Huanca by Billie Clarken courtesy of © Peres Projects
Bourgeois + Greenberg + Ono
Embrace the World from Within