Alone, Together

In Alone, Together, for instance, a pair of roughly eight-foot structures stand beside one another, but separate and not touching. Each figure is built upon on an armature of elegantly bent wood covered in gold leaf. The skeleton figures are given three-dimensional form by streams of deep-scarlet-dyed sisal strings tied to them. Sisal, a natural string made from the Agave plant grown throughout Latin America, takes brilliantly colored dyes easily. In this case, the scarlet of the humble sisal resonates paradoxically against the rich shine of the golden wood by juxtaposing colonial ideas of wealth-and-luxury against power and poverty of the colonized while using both as “sliding signifiers.” The sisal is not stretched tightly over the frames: it forms gentle, slightly uneven lines between the wooden forms emphasizing its natural plant-based source. The strings that hang freely tend to crimp and curl more tightly towards the ends, like hair frizzing on a humid day. The pose of the framed figures seems to suggest power and authority but one that feels shaky or undermined. One might think of them as armatures for great ceremonial robes, the robes themselves, or the figures intended to fill those robes. The “figure” to the left appears more self-assured, more imposing, and more hieratic (with a high standing collar perhaps) than the “figure” to the right, which appears less self-assured, more closed and more self-protective, but with arms that either embrace or snare passersby. They might represent the Catholic Church in Latin America: the figures alluding to Cardinals dressed in their rich scarlet robes embellished with golden embroidery, attempting to wield what they thought was absolute power over the peoples of the New World. Or they might represent the reproduction of exquisitely gilded ornamentation of the Baroque Church in Spain with hollowed out imitations in gold paint produced by mostly enslaved indigenous peoples in its Latin American colonies. Or they might represent past (and/or present) gold-mining processes in Ecuador—perhaps scaffolding used for the extraction of gold. The two figures are tethered to the ground by two large nuggets of gold . Emphasizing the space between the figures are two smaller fragments of gold, which connect yet separate. The search for gold was one of the primary reasons for Spanish colonialization of Latin America in the sixteenth century, with gold mining still remaining a major source of Ecuador’s economic wealth. But gold has also brought many forms of enslavement to the nation, actual and economic, past and present, and in many ways has proven to be a mixed blessing.

(Excerpt from writing by Joy Sperling for exhibition at Gallery 310 at Marietta College, Ohio, USA)