Graves for the Rain and 500 Places at Once blend sound, performance, and poetry, engaging visitors in ecological narratives. On view through February 16, 2025.
Graves for the Rain + 500 Places at Once
on view through February 16, 2025
Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, debuts two new exhibitions, Graves for the Rain, the first solo museum exhibition by artist and musician Karima Walker, and 500 Places at Once, an exhibition of newly commissioned sculptural poems by the poet CAConrad.
On view through February 16, 2025, both exhibitions feature artists whose respective practices in sound, performance, and poetry bring expansive and nontraditional formats into the museum. Fundamentally interdisciplinary, Graves for the Rain and 500 Places at Once are aligned with MOCA’s exhibition program, which frequently centers on artists and practitioners who engage media in experimental ways and offer radical examinations of urgent socio-cultural issues.
While both artists share an embodied approach to language, form, sound, and installation, the exhibitions are distinctive for the expansive ways in which they engage the visitor. In Graves for the Rain, Walker uses sound, sculpture, and durational performance to respond to the ecological destruction of the Santa Cruz River. Informed by the history of human intervention in the river and her sustained sonic engagement with the landscape, the artist creates an immersive quadraphonic sound work that plays audio of the artist generating the ring-shaped sculpture that resides in the center of the gallery. Throughout the exhibition, the artist will return and perform a series of grief rituals with the sculpture that involves path-making and scattering soil, adding new layers to the sculpture over time.
Where Walker’s installation foregrounds absence, sound, and gradual change through performance, Conrad’s 500 Places at Once gives language physical form by transforming poetry into a series of sculptures. Each poem is channeled through Conrad’s (soma)tic writing rituals—exercises that engage the body and environment to expand perception and the possibilities of language. The curving poems speak of ecological grief, aliveness, love, and liberation. Scaled in relation to the body, the poem sculptures are gathered in the gallery like a group of animate people or creatures—a three-dimensional encounter with poetry that underscores entanglements between language, the environment, and the body.
While the disciplines and tone of each exhibition are distinct, they intersect in their shared focus on different ways to experience an artwork. Walker’s installation encourages the visitor to be with the sensations and associations that come up when we attend to sound, movement, and material change over a prolonged period of time. Similarly, in their physicality, Conrad’s poem sculptures invite an embodied reading experience.
CAConrad: 500 Places at Once is organized by Laura Copelin, deputy director and lead curator with Alexis Wilkinson, curator.
Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, curator.
moca-tucson.org
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