TOUCH, TASTE, AND SMELL
A MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE AT SITE SANTA FE
Sight and sometimes sound guide us through most art exhibitions. We rarely engage our senses of touch, taste, and smell, sometimes in inexplicit ways. Three installations on view — Creative Residencies: Johnny Ortiz, Joanna Keane Lopez’s Land Craft Theatre, and Oswaldo Maciá’s New Cartographies of Smell Migration — challenge the ways we think about art. One is by a regional chef who, until now, wasn’t an exhibiting artist. Another is by an artist who works with materials that are rarely used in a contemporary art context. And the last is by an artist who uses scent to immerse the visitor in a sensory experience.
“As artists, both Joanna and Oswaldo expand and push the definition of contemporary sculpture through material and process,” SITE curator Brandee Caoba says. “Their installations align beautifully, each following threads of place and memory, challenging our understanding of space and time and permanence — Oswaldo through sound and scent, Joanna through land-based materials and tradition.”
CREATIVE RESIDENCIES: JOHNNY ORTIZ
Even though chef and ceramist Johnny Ortiz’s SITE Santa Fe installation is visual and not about taste or smell in any overt way, it incorporates objects made for food. Ortiz’s ceramics are placed atop adobe bricks, which are stacked in two layers and arranged in a circle, like the open pits he uses to fire them in. He uses the ceramics in an ongoing, food-based project called /Shed.
/Shed is a small-scale dinner project that brings people together to enjoy hand-gathered foods from New Mexico. He serves the food in the ceramic plates and bowls made from locally sourced materials.
“I think of it as an art project but also a life project,” Ortiz says. “I grew up on Taos Pueblo. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve kind of gathered that there is no separation there between spiritual life and modern-day life. I’ve adapted that mindset to everything that I do.”
Ortiz’s installation is the second one to come out of SITE’s Creative Residencies program, which was developed to highlight the creativity of people in the community who don’t necessarily identify as artists and invite them to work on projects that bring an unexpected experience into a gallery setting.
His installation stems from a project that’s about mindfulness. His dinners are culinary-based observances of place that foster sustainable, conscious eating habits.
“The dinners themselves are based around wild endemic plants and animals,” he says. “New Mexico has the largest biodiversity of wild food plants in the whole country.”
Ortiz’s unglazed ceramics are made from micaceous clay, hand dug at an undisclosed location near Taos Pueblo.
“It’s all hand-processed,” he says. “I dig it, process it, form it, and sand it with local sandstone from the mountains nearby. I polish it with river stones and fire it with red cedar. They’re functional but also sculptural. You can throw any of them in the oven or over a flame and cook off them. The more you use them, the more they absorb the fats from the foods you use and the marks from the silverware. They’re like little time capsules of the use that’s gone into them.”
In addition to the ceramics, the installation includes an 8-millimeter film by Maida Branch, with an original score by Diné artist Ryan Dennison, detailing the process that Ortiz uses to make his wares.
LAND CRAFT THEATRE
Long before the Spanish Pueblo Revival style became a prominent feature of Santa Fe’s architecture, structures built from adobe were a common feature of buildings and homes throughout the state.
Houses were built from sun-dried clay bricks mixed with grass for strength, mortared with mud, and covered with additional protective layers of mud. Knowing how to do it right required expertise.
After visiting her family’s historic adobe homes in Socorro, houses built by her ancestors and long since abandoned, Joanna Keane Lopez was inspired to work with mud as her primary medium, creating large-scale installations using the techniques of the adoberas and enjarradoras, women who’ve mastered the art of constructing and preserving earthen architecture.
“You can really see a relationship between an adobe home and the health of the family or community, because adobe architecture requires care and maintenance,” says Lopez. “I studied with Anita Rodríguez and Carole Crews to learn the craft of the adobera. Anita’s a contractor. She’s had a business in Taos called Enjarradora for, like, 20 years. I was trained on how to mud plaster or to enjarre. An enjarradora is a woman mud plasterer.”
Lopez’s minimalist installation is composed of four arched adobe walls, evenly spaced a few feet apart in the museum’s SITELab gallery. Each wall is made from regionally sourced materials, including the pigments used to add color to the walls. Each wall is decorated with horizontal bands of color made from a mixture of pigment, casein, and mud, which is plastered rather than painted on the surfaces.
Lopez is preserving a skill that’s in danger of dying out. Only two large-scale operations for the manufacturing of abode bricks exist in New Mexico, she says. Once, there were many.
Land Craft Theatre is about materiality. It highlights the versatility of adobe and mud plaster as mediums while emphasizing the use of land-sourced materials.
Lopez takes a traditional skill and adapts it to a contemporary art form.
The sculptures, however, can’t be moved safely without damaging them. So, when the exhibit comes down, so do the walls. Adobe is ephemeral. It’s tough but can’t last without maintenance. For Lopez, who’s been creating similar installations for the last six years, working with the material is also a sustainable practice.
“Adobe architecture has a lifespan,” she says. “It’s like a living thing that you literally have to take care of. When it comes down, I will recycle these into another project.”
NEW CARTOGRAPHIES OF SMELL MIGRATION
Colombian-born artist Oswaldo Maciá’s multimedia installation combines audio and visual components with scents to create an immersive experience. It’s the artist’s first exhibition in the United States.
A sound component composed of wind that Maciá recorded in desert regions around the world and calls of cross-pollinating insects from the rainforests of his homeland forms the central part of the installation. The sounds come from 16 free-standing speakers, which are surrounded on three walls by hand-drawn and painted maps of the world that reference the migration of tree resins from one location to another, as they were imported and exported over the centuries.
In particular, the project involves the resins of Peruvian balsam from El Salvador and styrax gum
from the Honduran rainforest. These resins, and their accompanying scents, played significant religious, cultural, and medicinal roles among Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
“In the 16th century, the Spanish took Peru Balsamo to China,” he says. “They would drink it. They would use it for medicine. Migration is not just a lot of people in a boat. It’s more than that. Migration is knowledge. Migration is culture.”
Mechanical diffusers suspended from the ceiling sway back and forth through the installation, gently heating the resins inside them, and spreading the accompanying scents through the exhibition.
The purpose behind the sound component is to underscore the symbiotic relationship between wind and cross-pollinating insects, which is critical to sustaining the plant life from which many of the resins used for incense and other scent-based products come.
“It’s about coevolution and coexistence,” he says.