LOS ANGELES — It was 65 degrees and sunny the day I visited Earthshaker, an exhibition of work by Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Staff staged across two rooms at Del Vaz Projects. Between the entrance and the gallery door is a courtyard with a terracotta fountain, a mass of night-blooming jasmine, and a bowed lemon tree. Encountering Staff’s hallucinatory five-channel video installation in any context would be a jarring experience. But stepping from the sun-filled patio into a small dark room thrumming with the sound of rotary propellers and strobing with fluorescent lights, flickering texts, and vertiginous colored discs precipitates a dislocation of another order. To start, your eyes, unable to adjust to the sudden darkness or the bursts of acrid light, go temporarily blind. Then, along with the film playing across five holographic LED fans, is an array of ocular disturbances: coruscating spots, sparks of electrical charge, a building sensation of pressure. The lights seem to course through you, leaving visual scars in their stead.
Staff’s video “In Ektase” (2023) displays a poem shown word by word, line by line, regularly interrupted by flashes of radioactive pink and line drawings of exploding sunbeams. Disjunctive phrases like “descend slowly deeper into hell/ w/ velocity” and “the weight of reality, like tragedy/gravity, inevitably” are followed by the repetition of the words “I AM ALIVE/ YOU ARE DEAD.” After five minutes, the blades stop rotating, and the lights go up until the film begins again. In this new context, static fans that might otherwise be regarded as HVAC equipment appear menacing, like weaponry — this is perhaps the point. Similarly to Staff’s other filmic works, the installation is intended to affect a dysphoric, dissociated state reminiscent of the one queer and trans bodies are regularly subjected to by social systems of violence and oppression.
A spectral afterimage hovers above the four photographs by Mendieta on the adjoining wall. Like the glow, the images from her Siluetas (1973–80) series visualize the presence of absence. In “Untitled: Silueta Series” (1978), a flowering vine adumbrates a hardly perceptible silhouette against a tree trunk, and in “Untitled: Silueta Series” (c. 1980), igneous rock cradles a recessed figure covered in a bioluminescent moss. In the second room, the disembodied body is animated on Super 8 mm film in “Untitled (Silueta Series)” (1978). For the duration of the three-minute video, a silhouette limned in white gunpowder burns to ash as a wreath of smoke carries the figure away into the atmosphere.
There are no burn scars or plumes of smoke in the five assemblage paintings by Jarman featured in the presentation, only evidence of heat’s alchemical properties. The canvases are primed with lead, gilded, and covered over in thick layers of tar and black oil paint. Jarmen arranged the various found objects — prayer books, driftwood, nails, cartridge cases, wedding bands, and sheets of shattered glass — atop the viscous substrate while it was still bubbling, permanently affixing them to the surface as it dried. The burnished black rectangles resemble voids into which the detritus of this world has been cast. Or perhaps they’re portals unto another world altogether, where the objects are free of the resonances they bear here, like prosecution, pain, or shame.
Audre Lorde once referenced planarians, the small, self-generating animal species that sends out an electrical charge in the shape of their severed or damaged limbs, as part of her summons to envision the future we wish to inhabit. The artists in Earthshaker, too, draw our attention to the negative space. They ask us to acknowledge loss and to reckon with the harm that’s been done — but also to see the innumerable possibilities of altering the shape entirely.
Earthshaker: Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Staff continues at Del Vaz Projects (259 19th Street, Santa Monica, California) through April 18.