Bounty

Maria Thereza Alves, Tacita Dean, Camille Henrot, Nick Herman, Lucia Hinojosa, Margaret Honda, Candice Lin, Rodney McMillian, Lui Shtini

Curated by Nick Herman

"By Destinie, and can no other choose?"

- Milton, Paradise Lost

In both literature and history, bounty has come to be synonymous with these extreme latitudes: utopia versus eschatology.

Regardless of outcome, bounty is linked to fate and illustrates the contours of fantasy as defined by our material world.

As such, those in search of bounty have long been concerned with classifying and controlling our planet’s flora and fauna and, by extension, its peoples.

These tensions can be seen in Maria Thereza Alves’s Utopia, which pairs the artist’s photographs of her native Brazil with texts that describe the contradiction inherent in a “promised” land. The way faith in words determines power and shapes both religion and science also underlies the performance, poetry, and photographs of Mexico City based Lucía Hinojosa. In Hinojosa’s Accion Fertil (Fertile Action) and for Candice Lin, who combines language and performance with multimedia sculpture to explore history, research is an essential instrument for deconstructing cultural taxonomies. Lin’s Despacho for Chinese Coolie Laborers mixes a rigorous inquiry into colonial economics with an interest in syncretic and divinatory systems. This correlation between inchoate materials and social systems can be seen in Rodney McMillian’s Untitled (sac) II and in Nick Herman’s A Self Sustaining System, where magnets are used to animate an inert form. Both works evoke hybridity, pairing landscape with anatomy. This coupling of tyranny and the sublime can be seen in Camille Henrot’s ongoing drawing series Tropics of Love and in Tacita Dean’s short film The Green Ray. The repercussion of faith is expertly dissected in Dean’s relentless loop of a setting sun and in the morphology of Henrot’s trans (sex/ species) tourists. This sense that not only materials, but the land itself is haunted, can also be seen in the paintings of Lui Shtini, whose meticulous marks belie the way grace and subversion are inexorably intertwined.