a place above the water
Maryssa Rose Chavez, Grace Rosario Perkins, Sarah M. Rodriguez, and Fox Maxy

co-curated with Maida Branch
June 3 – July 15, 2023

a place above the water is a gift to the non-living, to the ones that exist as stars and comets now, to the ghost world, to the ones I never met but meet when coming across their shells on the forest floor. 

Conceptualized by Maida Branch, this exhibition and accompanying shop concept by MAIDA are an ode to P‘æ‘kilâ, where Maida’s paternal lineage stems from. In the Towa language meaning,  'a place above the water', P‘æ‘kilâ (also known as Pecos Pueblo) was a thriving community in the Pecos River Valley that lost seventy-five percent of its population over three generations, as a result of Spanish and Mexican take over, Comanche attacks, and disease. The remaining people of Pecos Pueblo sought refuge with their neighbors in Jemez Pueblo and elsewhere in the region, and the descendants of P‘æ‘kilâ live on today through the lineage of many people in Northern New Mexico. Oral histories say that P‘æ‘kilâ had a powerful spring, and the sound of rushing water was a soundtrack of the place. 

The relationship between land and water in the desert is at once powerful and fragile, ancient and ever-renewing. The geology of the American Southwest reveals layers of history inscribed upon the land by water. About one million years ago, glaciers that carved valleys and lakes and flooded basin floors disappeared, leaving behind alluvial fans, layers of silt, and rock terraces. Even deeper in geologic time; around 250 million years ago, part of so-called New Mexico was covered by a shallow sea. It is not uncommon to find seashells buried in the earth here. This land’s memory was carved and cradled by water. 

In this exhibition, Maryssa Rose Chavez, Grace Rosario Perkins, Sarah M. Rodrigez and Fox Maxy explore concepts of home, ancestry, memory learned and lost, desert and sea, and multidimensional time. Bringing together a wide range of material practices, this exhibition opens up conduits for connection and storytelling between four artists living and working in these ancient ocean basins and coastal lands.

Maryssa Rose Chavez’s documentary photography reflects on family, home, and landscape in Northern New Mexico. Growing up around the Espanola River Basin / Valley, Maryssa’s grandfather dubbed this area ‘the bottom of the ocean’. Pulling from her past body of work ‘Plebe Under Ocean’, this new work displays images within frames which are made from materials that speak to ancestral practices, some of which are heirlooms made by family members. Chavez invokes ideas of domesticana, a term created by artist and Chicana-feminist theorist Amalia Mesa-Bains to refer to artworks centered on materials and techniques traditionally associated with both women and men where she is from. A palpable sense of loss and grief permeates her work, giving way to a reminder of the capacity for hope and survival. 

Grace Rosario Perkins’ intensely personal paintings, made for this exhibition, similarly serve to chronicle her recent experiences of grief, joy, abundance, and transformation. Her style of maximalist diaristic abstraction seeks to share a personal narrative by working intuitively, layering paint, altar oils, seeds, words, found objects and images; the gems and the refuse of her day-to-experience. As she lives and works with her collage-like canvases, they transform through dense layering, additive and subtractive, becoming an artifact of her personal history and a mind map of her associations.

Sarah M. Rodriguez sculptures come from an ongoing series of three-dimensional cast aluminum forms; amalgamations of found objects from their environment such as shells, bones, branches, leaves, and seed pods. In the casting process, the assemblages the artist creates from organic materials are burned away, leaving a hardened remnant of the exchange between the artist and the material that has been transmuted from ephemeral to permanent. Uncovering a world in which nature and culture blend and merge while beings and places become together, Rodriguez’s sculptural works feel like remnants of an ancient sea.

Fox Maxy presents two digital films on loop, displayed on a 2003 Hello Kitty CRT TV. Fox Maxy’s films are cutting, swirling, woozy pop culture-inflicted collage, blending lo-fi camcorder footage, archival images, .gifs, iPhone recordings, and an audio score of distorted voiceovers, trap music, and sound effects. Her films capture the layered experience of time memorial home, and the honoring and embodiment of her people in their human, plant, animal, and land form, all of their relations. In her words, “This film is me speaking for me and that’s it.”

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