A Decorative Cosmology Bridging Heaven and Earth

In her new exhibition, Tamara Gonzales continues to mine our material culture to chart the world all around.


A view of Tamara Gonzeles’s Ometeotl exhibition (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)

At the heart of Tamara Gonzales‘s new body of work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is a room of tapestries woven by artisans in the Peruvian towns of Písac and Ayacucho. They are vibrant interpretations of the artist’s drawings and they add yet another layer to the decorative language she continues to mine from the material world around her.

Gonzales is known for incorporating visual culture that has traditionally been more associated with lived culture — lace, graffiti, embroidery, textiles — rather than the world of art galleries. A large functional maraca is propped up by the entrance, which signals the inclusive and non-hierarchal attitude towards influence she celebrates in her work.A large maraca sculpture near the entrance of the exhibition, “Maraca más grande con plumas” (2016)

Past the over-sized maraca, there is a corridor of small drawings dominated by a curvilinear window motif that offers her a compositional frame to puncture, cover, and react to. But even with this structure, the drawings have an experimental energy that pokes and pushes, often jostling forms that resemble easter eggs, stick figures, plants, or the scribblings of a rudimentary language.

Her true subject matter is the material world. She has an indiscriminate appetite for cross-cultural pollination and distills the dissonance of contemporary life into these objects that can seem as jarring as they are soothing.

The title of the exhibition, Ometeotl, refers to a nebulous concept of spirituality that some scholars of Mesoamerican culture dispute, but it is commonly believed to refer to the “creator of all creation” for the Anawak people and a compound of “dual” and “cosmic energy” in the native language of Nahuatl. That ambiguity of the term perfectly reflects the primordial soup that has spawned these works, at once mythic, while relishing their connection to earthly forms.

Looking at her paintings, you can feel unmoored from the boundaries of form as they swim in waves of moody azure, crimson, and the muddy waters of darker hues. The paintings vibrate and ripple in your mind’s eye as they play with proportion — always challenging the relationship of ground and subject — to settle visually like a shaken snow globe. Many of the large paintings, like “Two Moons” (2016), feel contradictory, contrasting the washes of violet paint against the frenzy of patterns that form the sky and ground for a setting Mesoamerican roundel.

The showstoppers, though, are the tapestries. Gonzales’s starry fields and human-like forms are translated into undulating visions of horror vacui. They are her best works yet, offering us a unique synthesis of the world around her but allowing it to develop into these intensely colored objects (she says the women doing the embroidery were given free reign to translate her drawings, based on patterns they normally embroider). The works, which are all untitled and made of alpaca and wool, convey a sense of cosmic cartography. If anything, the embroideries make the paintings seem more conventional, showing how her many bodies of work may overlap but travel in different directions.

The paintings are declarations of the known, the drawings are suggestions of what can be known, while the woven works are proposals for what we may never ever truly know.Tamara Gonzales, “Two Moons” (2016)Tamara Gonzales, “I Am the Hummingbird” (2016)The room of embroidered worksTamara Gonzales’s untitled drawing (2015) and the related untitled tapestry (2016)
Untitled tapestry (2016)

male and female pornotroping

Seventeenth-Century Dutch

http://www.hnanews.org/archive/2009/04/brienen.html
Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 288 pp, 17 color, 72 b&w illus. ISBN 978-90-5356-947-4 and 978-90-5356-947-2.

Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. 320 pp, 69 color, 97 b&w illus. ISBN 978-0-300-10038-9.

Rebecca Parker Brienen's Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Braziland Julie Berger Hochstrasser's Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin: they examine effects – the visual documentation – of exotic travel and exploration by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Hochstrasser examines the impact of the Dutch East India Company (VOC from the Dutch initials) trading with India, Indonesia and China, and the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in the Americas, largely in terms of items that were brought back to Europe (sugar, tea, tobacco, etc.) and their subsequent appearance in paintings. Brienen concentrates on the artist Albert Eckhout in Brazil and the role of the West India Company there. (Indeed, Hochstrasser also includes a discussion on Eckhout within the more lengthy discussion of the Dutch Brazilian colony.)

We get a glimpse of the exotic from the very beginning of Brienen's Introduction, in which she proposes that we imagine Eckhout's arrival with the artist Frans Post and the colony's new governor, Johan Maurits in Recife, Brazil, in 1637, and those who may have come to greet the ship: merchants, employees of the WIC, "Portuguese planters, members of the Jewish Community, African slaves, free people of mixed ethnic background and representatives of local indigenous groups" – with squawking flocks of green parrots flying overhead and in view of passion flowers and papayas. The color, sounds and wonders of this world even today, more than 450 years later, are still exotic. Although Brienen's focus is Eckhout, she provides a larger context for this western artist's life and predecessors in Brazil and fields the issue of his "ethnographic art."

Brienen's book should also be considered with the 2004 exhibition catalogue, Albert Eckhout, A Dutch Artist in Brazil (ed. Quentin Buvelot), for the exhibition at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, which covers much the same material and acknowledges Brienen's previous work. The larger format of that catalogue and its many larger and detailed illustrations make it more accessible – but it cannot replace Brienen's book. They cover much the same material but do not entirely agree (the artist's birth year, in fact, is a contentious point – Brienen thinks c. 1607, not c. 1610), and the focus in the exhibition (despite its title) is really on the patron and the WIC.

Brienen discusses possible explanations for Eckhout's extraordinary paintings and the possibility of a pictorial cycle – including eight "ethnographic life-size paintings for a 'princely chamber' for Vrijburg Palace." Later, these and other works (26 in all) would be a gift of the Count Johan Maurits to his cousin Frederick III of Denmark for his kunstkamer (and they remain in Copenhagen today). Other works also went to Louis XIV of France and the Elector of Brandenburg. The wonder of the Brazilian world – its people, flora, vegetation – created a universal desire and one that Maurits could barter for money and title.

Africans and multi-ethnic Brasilianen, Tapuyas and Tupinamba peoples and those called Mulattos and Mameluca of the New World are the subject of Eckhout's stunning life-size paintings. To what degree should we hold Eckhout accountable for a realistic portrait of them? And are these men and women slaves or free? Are they even "noble free" people? The role of African slaves in Brazil and labor for the WIC is integral to her study – as it is critical, with a different slant, for Hochstrasser. But as Brienen points out – and Hochstrasser stresses – this Dutch colony could not have successfully existed without slavery. Over 60,000 African slaves were reportedly laboring in the Dutch-occupied Pernambuco (Brazil) by mid-century. The Dutch Court and the WIC did much to cement relations with the Congo and Angola to assure West African slave trade. From 1634 onwards, the WIC was actively involved in the importation of slaves into the Americas.

This information is also critical to Hochstrasser's theme from the beginning. As commodities (lavishly illustrated) are her central concentration (with chapters on the VOC and the WIC) her subheadings are: cheese, herring, beer (local); grain, lemons (also oranges – via Europe); pepper, porcelain, tea (via VOC); and salt, tobacco, sugar (via WIC). We should not be surprised to see that the subheading slaves as a commodity (via WIC), was a necessary one. In each case, Hochstrasser uses Dutch (and Flemish) still-life painting to show how and when the commodities appeared through trade. In the midst of Chinese porcelain and Turkish carpets, the use of black Africans in painting is likened to the display of a commodity as part of "riches from abroad." She unequivocally states that everyone who even invested in the WIC was involved in the slave trade. One cannot separate one aspect of it from another. The slave trade is not just apparent in the presence of Africans in paintings, but in the presence of other commodities that were only available as a result of slave labor.

Hochstrasser investigates the commodities in depth – as they are seen, as they were traded, where they came from, their mention in diaries, diets, documents, poems, prints, and their relation to Spanish, Portuguese, and English traders' ships. Not only will one not look at still-life the same way – one will not even look at salt the same way! And certainly not sugar (and the spun-sugar sweets in still-life painting), since often it was the sugar production that was the reason for the grueling life of plantation slave labor in Brazil. Although the Dutch did not begin the slave trade, by the 1630s they were well into it. The wealth of the Golden Age, all set before us in pronkstilleven, could not have been available without it.

With Hochstrasser's unraveling of the still lifes and their sources and Brienen's analysis of the role of Eckhout and the WIC in Brazil, we can no longer look at these works and only write about composition. Their work challenges us to change ours.

Frima Fox Hofrichter
Pratt Institute

Spectacular Rhetorics

Spectacular Rhetorics is a rigorous analysis of the rhetorical frameworks and narratives that underlie human rights law, shape the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimit public responses to violence and injustice. Integrating visual and textual criticism, Wendy S. Hesford scrutinizes “spectacular rhetoric,” the use of visual images and rhetoric to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners, chiefly Americans. Hesford presents a series of case studies critiquing the visual representations of human suffering in documentary films, photography, and theater. In each study, she analyzes works addressing a prominent contemporary human rights cause, such as torture and unlawful detention, ethnic genocide and rape as a means of warfare, migration and the trafficking of women and children, the global sex trade, and child labor. Through these studies, she demonstrates how spectacular rhetoric activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations, consolidates identities through the politics of recognition, and configures material relations of power and difference to produce and, ultimately, to govern human rights subjects.
About The Author(s)


Wendy S. Hesford is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, a co-author of Rhetorical Visions: Writing and Reading in a Visual Culture, and a co-editor of Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation and Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real.”