Untitled Artworks

The55Project will present a self-taught indigenous visual artist Miguel Penha Chiquitano for the first time in the USA, and the artists Laura Gorski and Efe Godoy. The Booth welcomes hybridity and encounters of lives that combine the body, its double and the wild lives that sustain them.

The assembly of o cio da terra / ócio da terra [estrus of the earth / idleness of the earth], made with a set of works by Efe Godoy, Laura Gorski and Miguel Penha Chiquitano, welcomes hybridity and encounters of lives that combine the body, its double and the wild lives that sustain them.

Laura Gorski's body-earth makes the density of the material that defines the shapes of her works coexist with subtleties applied to the extremities of lives in gestation. In direct reference to what the artist-mother experienced while generating life in her womb, the encounters between body-earth and plants applied in the work allude to the way nature manifests itself, in cycles of fertility and pause. With movements intertwined in double figures, each work bears witness to the being-in-the-world of bodies aware of their own expansion and dissolution.

While the ground and the materiality of the earth define the figures in Gorski's works, the fluidity with which Efe Godoy promotes the encounter of plural lives chooses water as the guiding element of colors that give life to fabulous beings. "I'm still surprised by what I say to the many I am," writes the artist in her book, Being hybrid, appearing hybrid, when she considers maintaining the "wild will" as an access to the infinite. Understood as "transformed nature", the artist's identity, the beings and fables that populate her practice, are daily rituals in favor of the emancipation of imaginary worlds.

Originally from the Chiquitano and Bororo peoples, Miguel Penha Xiquitano focuses his practice on the light and biodiversity of the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado. Over the course of approximately four decades, he has entangled his body in the density of the forest, living with trees whose multicolored trunks and leaves provide a unique plastic vocabulary in Brazilian painting. Contact with the ferrous color of the watercourses that flow from Chapada dos Guimarães has transformed the rivers into the veins of a divine body. Like a guardian of the forest and its magic, his landscapes discard any conception of life that disintegrates the subject from nature.”