Carriers
In the late Ursula K. Le Guin’s influential 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the science-fiction author reimagines the story of human origin by re-centering early technology on the ‘cultural carrier bag,’ shifting focus away from the primacy of the hunter’s spear. For Le Guin, such weapons of domination are exactly that— brutal, linear accessories of patriarchy and colonization. Instead, this recast carrier, such as a shell, gourd, or vessel, represents the generative strategy that is gathering. She understands the act of gathering as a method of storytelling, the refusal of a central “hero,” and a (re)configuring of worlds. She insists that gathering stories and creating intersectional narratives can bring realities into being and subsequently lead to new approaches of shared ritual. Furthermore, Le Guin emphasizes how communities already write alternative stories—they have been crafting them for a long time in their resistance against the dominant story of imperialist violence and oppression. Directly citing Le Guin’s essay, the exhibition The Carriers brings together the intergenerational and multi-disciplinary work of artists Joiri Minaya (b. 1990) and Anne Austin Pearce (b. 1968), whose art practices endeavor to unpack the colonial urges and histories around collecting, controlling, and exploiting Nature.
Minaya’s ongoing Containers, a series of performative photographs initiated in 2015 and on view in The Carriers, features the artist wearing bodysuits constructed from fabric of highly patterned prints of tropical plants. Wearing these head-to-toe bodysuits, Minaya situates herself in tropical settings amidst flora, shorelines, and rivers. The patterned bodysuits envelop every part of the artist’s body, blending into the landscape like camouflage. Like Hawaiian shirts often found in tourist gift shops and colorful floral caftans sold at beach resorts, the bodysuits and their patterns perform as an exploitative botanical archive of Western imperialism.
Historically constructed by colonial desires, ‘the tropical’ has become a meta-ready-made: decorative, interchangeable, and a vessel for disposable branding. Minaya’s work uses the tropical to critique colonialism and as a means to locate and reclaim agency. Her performance of camouflage evokes both the hyper-visibility and invisibility of women in the tropics, as imagined from a colonized gaze. She pushes the performative even further, posing in the photographs in ways that directly reference what’s pictured in the results of a Google image search of “Dominican women.”* The artworks beg the question, How accurate are these images assembled through databases and search engines? The images in the search, and therefore in Minaya’s work, mimic the exotic fantasies cultivated through the supposedly “neutral” A.I. lens. With her poses in Containers, Minaya’s repossesses representations of Dominican women in an exploration on how identity destabilizes and shifts historical and contemporary issues of representation.
Pearce’s small sculptures, which run through the middle of the exhibition, exist somewhere between decorative glass vessels and emollient blobs. Natural debris like shells, sticks, and stones are embedded in each of the vessel-like sculptures, which appear at once ensnared and memorialized. Central to Pearce’s investigation is a deep interest in reconfiguring human relationships to Earth and all its living inhabitants. She has traveled the world, observing landscapes and eco-systems—especially those which are tropical—that has suffered various levels of exploitation and extraction through colonial and Capitalistic practices. Her work draws attention to the human tendency to isolate, pull apart, and exploit the natural world, while also examining the conflicting realms of eco-colonialism and empathy.
For Pearce, glass is the perfect material to gather, carry, and ultimately display the natural ephemera she stores and reflects upon. The vessels are both the captor and the contained, a visual reference of this Anthropocene-era in which humans are centered as the dominant influence of the Earth’s climate dynamics. But, echoing Indigenous knowledge, the artist aims to break down this human-topped hierarchy. She uses her fantastical glass forms to imagine an alternate system of interspecies collaboration, wherein artistic strategies stimulate dialogue about possibilities for human and non-human animals to work together in Nature and going forward. Pearce is a species-maker activitating what eco-feminist Donna Haraway terms “tentacular thinking,” in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble. The tentacular tangles and intertwines; it is an emergent strategy in which humans, animals and plants are called to think collectively and combine old and new stories to imagine the unknown. Like Le Guin’s carrier bags and Haraway’s tentacles, Pearce’s vessels are in themselves hybrid-creatures offering an alternative path forward.
Introducing a refrain for the Anthropocene, Haraway writes:
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
In a cultural and environmental moment when alternative stories and new worlds are needed more than ever, Minaya and Pearce propose strategies that shift, dismantle, and rupture. They begin to imagine the unimaginable. Together, these two bodies of work engage questions surrounding ethics and aesthetics of contemporary ecology, as well as the assumed vessel that is humanity. The artists ultimately ask: In this carrier bag, what is consumed, preserved, stored, and destroyed, and under whose authority?
Kate McNamara
PCG Curator at Large
*In 2016, Minaya made another artwork, entitled “#dominicanwomengooglesearch,” which consisted of various cardboard cutouts of images resulting from a Google search. Containers build on the artist’s research for the earlier work.