PURGATORIO
EPOCH x UCR ARTS in conjunction with PST ART: Art & Science Collide
September 21, 2024 – February 2, 2025
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | Lucia Grossberger Morales | Xandra Ibarra | Yazan Khalili | Rurru Mipanochia | Vick Quezada | Marton Robinson | Miguel Ángel Salazar & Carlos Iván Hernández
Curated by April Baca
My country, O my land, my friends –
Am I apart – here from you in a land
Where all your gas-lights, faces, sputum gleam
Like something left, forsaken? Here am I –
And are these stars, the high plateau, the scents
Of Eden, and the dangerous tree – are these
The landscape of confession, and if confession,
So absolution? Wake pines – but pines wake here.
I dream the too-keen cider, the too-soft snow.
Where are the bayonets, that the scorpion may not grow?
Here quakes of earth make houses fall,
And all my countrymen I see rush toward one stall.
Exile is thus a purgatory—not such as Dante built,
But rather like a blanket than a quilt,
And I have no decision—is it green or brown
That I prefer to country or to town?
I am unraveled, umbilical anew,
So ring the church bells here in Mexico
(They ring too obdurately here to heed my call) –
And what hours they forget to chime I’ll know,
As one whose altitude, at one time, was not so.
– Hart Crane, Purgatorio (Unfinished)
EPOCH proudly presents Purgatorio, a group exhibition organized with UCR ARTS as part of the institution’s Getty Pacific Standard Time Art (PST ART) 2024 Art & Science Collide initiative Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World. Exhibited as both a virtual exhibition and physical installation, Purgatorio features intergenerational and globally dispersed artists whose artworks have been expanded in a virtual remodeling of the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Nigel, CA. Designed as a ziggurat by modernist architect William L. Pereira in 1968-71, the building has supported several government agencies since its initial use as an aerospace firm during the Cold War. This has included the U.S. Treasury Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Citizenship and Immigration Services, a palatable contradiction given the legacies of the ziggurat as a sacred site intended to serve as a medium between heaven and earth.
The exhibition visualizes the Holifield’s architectural and political contradictions as an incubator for political violence and communal displacement, particularly along the U.S./Mexico border, in an increasingly technologically mediated police state. Purgatorio takes its title from an unfinished poem by the American poet Hart Crane, a writer whose work mirrors the modernist fetishization of Mexico and border landscapes. Disillusioned with the burgeoning technological determinism prolific throughout the early 20th century, Crane conceived of exile from the United States into the borderlands as a type of purgatory – a romanticized (and seemingly uninhabited) space free from the reaches of technology.
Purgatorio borrows and problematizes Crane’s idealization of purgatory by underscoring the ziggurat and the borderlands’ shared, albeit contradictory, position as a seemingly liminal yet transitory space and geopolitical site of containment. Nuancing otherwise polarizing sentiments surrounding the U.S./Mexico border as a space of death or possibility, the exhibition features work by artists who contend with the violence of the U.S. military-industrial complex, necropolitical surveillance, immigration, and the mutation of culture, identity, and life across borders.
Download PDF of Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World publication
Shana Nys Dambrot, “13ThingsLA: September 25,” 13ThingsLA, September 24, 2024.