By JESS NICKEL

Timelines of the Future: Christine Howard Sandoval is the inaugural exhibition in Lucy Cotter’s Curator-in-Residence series at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center. Cotter brings sophistication and mastery to taming the cavernous space of Disjecta and presents a perfectly pitched show. If this show is a marker for what is to come in her season entitled Turnstones, I eagerly await the next exhibition.

It’s a dark and rainy day in February, and there is a shift that first has to take place before you start to recognize that this is a show about the desert, a place where water is hard-won. The three-channel video installation is the first work you notice at the end of the entrance corridor to the L-shaped exhibition space. Three screens are filled with the tans and ochres of dry desert landscapes. Walking through the entrance hallway the first object one encounters are hand-made adobe bricks arranged in a curving line, a deep groove is embedded into the top of each block. An illuminated web is projected over what looks like fragments of a river bed. The projected light spiders out around the adobe mud, text accompanies, these lines, reminiscent of a timeline. The text featured in CHANNEL–A Cartography of Thirst II, 2019/2021, is a mixture of locations, words, definitions, and histories. They ripple and morph over your body and feet as you walk through reading them. This installation prepares your body for the next piece that will be seen as you move through space.

There is a feeling of vertigo as one steps into the CHANNEL, 2017 a three-channel HD video with sound. The videos are shown from a slightly skewed first-person perspective, making you feel like the feet on the ground and the hands reaching out is almost your own. Barefoot feet walk in the river beds and fingertips touch the top layer of dry earth formed walls. Overhead the artist’s voice can be heard speaking of the beginnings and endings of cultures because of their relationship to water. 

Moving through the gallery, there are several Adobe mud works on paper I Am You/Or You Are Me (diptych), 2018, Land Form I- Distribution (diptych), 2018, Land Form III- Mother Ditch (diptych), 2019, and Land Form II- Diversion (diptych), 2018 that is positioned next to a single-channel video piece, Live Stream, 2018, of the artist walking in and around the site of the Acequia Madre in Taos, New Mexico from a first-person perspective. The beautiful geometric-shapes on paper draw you close, in an effort to confirm the tactile nature of the material, Adobe mud. One can imagine the artist scraping the wet Adobe mud to make the desired pattern, wiping the scraper after each motion, creating the next set of satisfyingly clean lines and grooves. A wall is a shadow on the land, 2020-21 deconstructs the story of the Pacific Coast lands during Spanish colonization and the forced enslavement of the local indigenous people in building the missions of California. The architectural forms of the Spanish missions are juxtaposed with photographs and forms of Indigenous nomadic architectures on the opposite wall.

Sandoval recalls and examines the histories of failed desert civilizations, however, the works and histories become personal as she explores both her Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic ancestries. The depiction of the ‘channel’ is persistent throughout Sandoval’s videos, sculptures, and installations in Timelines of the Future. Through her words and framing, Sandoval encourages the viewer to think beyond the water channels portrayed and to consider the associations of how channels of all forms are the pathways to resources like water, communication, and technology. She presents how our ownership, manipulation, and maintenance of channels has and always will determine a people’s success. Through her investigations, we see and remember the polarity of both the positive and negative ways in which people can manipulate the land and choose to share and/or conquer resources. Her work reminds us to remember the failings of our collective pasts and to not repeat the mistakes.

Timelines of the Future: Christine Howard Sandoval is the inaugural exhibition in Lucy Cotter’s Curator-in-Residence series at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center open from January 8 through February 21, 2021.

Jess Nickel is an independent curator and arts producer based in Portland, Oregon. She received a BA in Fine Art focusing on painting, and a BA in Literature from the University of Oregon in 2009 and began her career in the arts as an artist. In 2011 she was awarded a year-long artist residency with Engage Studios in Galway, Ireland. Here, she curated a series of pop-up exhibitions in vacant spaces throughout the city in collaboration with Niland Gallery. Since then, she has worked for institutions such as the For-Site Foundation in San Francisco, and held directorship positions at Disjecta Contemporary Arts Center, Upfor Gallery, Newspace, and Converge 45 in Portland. Currently, she is the studio manager of the public art company Site Specific and continues her independent curatorial practice through her roving exhibition series entitled SATOR projects.