Celebrating 20 Years, SITE Santa Fe Shows New Commissions and Collaborations

For this 20th-anniversary celebration, SITE is not only looking back at its own history, or reprising past projects, rather refreshingly the exhibits that comprise "SITE 20 Years/20 Shows" take the form of new work, commissions, and collaborations.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Janine Antoni and Stephen Petronio, Honey Baby, 2013. Copyright Janine Antoni and Stephen Petronio; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Celebrating 20 Years: SITE Santa Fe's Collaborative Spirit

A significant anniversary invites a retrospective view, and for SITE Santa Fe's 20th, the institution is doing just that, in a yearlong series of exhibitions featuring artists who have presented major works at SITE in the past. But for this 20th-anniversary celebration, SITE is not only looking back at its own history, or reprising past projects, rather refreshingly the exhibits that comprise "SITE 20 Years/20 Shows" take the form of new work, commissions, and collaborations.

Ann Hamilton, The common SENSE (detail), 2014-2015. Courtesy of the artist.

SITE Santa Fe opened in 1995 with its first International Biennial: Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, curated by Bruce Ferguson, and has since produced eight biennials, and over 80 exhibitions, helping to launch or galvanize the careers of numerous curators and artists. The notion of reconnecting with artists who have contributed to the institution's history, taking a look at then and now, exemplifies SITE's mission to form strong bonds with the international art community while cultivating deep roots within the community of Santa Fe and the wider Southwest region.

Amy Cutler, Cautionary Trail, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Presented in three installments, over spring, summer and fall, "SITE 20 Years/20 Shows" first opened in March with work by Gregory Crewdson, Deborah Grant, Roxy Paine, Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley, Rose B. Simpson, and Jessica Stockholder. The fall installment, opening October 23, will feature installations by Terry Allen, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Wangechi Mutu with Edgar Arceneaux, and Susan Silton with The Crowing Hens. The summer exhibition of "SITE 20 Years/20 Shows" is currently on view, until October 4, with installations and collaborations by Ann Hamilton, Janine Antoni with choreographer Stephen Petronio, Amy Cutler with musician Emily Wells and hairdresser Adriana Papaleo, Harmony Hammond with artist Francis Cape, and Dario Robleto with historian Patrick Feaster and Lance Ledbetter of Dust-to-Digital Records. While the wall texts throughout the show acknowledge the contributions of each of the artists to SITE Santa Fe's exhibitions of the past--Ann Hamilton, for instance, showed in the first Biennial and Janine Antoni showed a major solo show at SITE in 2002--the focus rests on the artists' current practices.

Dario Robleto, The Pulse Armed With a Pen (An Unknown History of the Human Heartbeat), 2014. Courtesy the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester, The Menil Collection.

The installations in the current configuration of "SITE 20 Years/20 Shows" exhibit few connections between them, with each occupying its own discrete room in the gallery. But if there is one conceptual thread running throughout, it is the notion of collaboration--collaboration among artists, between artists and institutions, artists and choreographers, musicians, historians, and so on. A successful collaborative effort can achieve results that a single artist couldn't produce on her own, a kind of synergistic effect that provides new contexts and new meanings to an artist's work. In an unsuccessful collaboration, on the other hand, compromises become more apparent than cooperation, resulting in a situation where one person's vision might supersede another to the detriment of the whole artwork. The wide range of artistic collaboration, both successful and unsuccessful, can be found in SITE Santa Fe's current exhibition.

Janine Antoni and Stephen Petronio, Honey Baby, 2013. Copyright Janine Antoni and Stephen Petronio; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Janine Antoni's collaboration with the choreographer Stephen Petronio, for instance, sheds new light on Antoni's practice with regard to the grotesque and expressive potential of the human body--in this case a male dancer's lithe form, emulating the movements of the body in utero--in a somewhat disturbing but entrancing video. And Dario Robleto's collaboration with sound historians Patrick Feaster and Lance Ledbetter results in a series of small vinyl albums--recordings of the human heart and early gospel spirituals--with extensive liner notes that convey a historical depth and artistic sensibility (despite the somewhat twee aesthetic), enhancing our apprehension of these early recordings visually, textually, and sonically.

Harmony Hammond and Francis Cape, Angle of Repose, 2015, installation view. Courtesy of the artists and SITE Santa Fe. Photo: Eric Swanson.

The collaborative installation by painter Harmony Hammond and sculptor Francis Cape, Angle of Repose (2015), on the other hand, is less apparent as a collaboration at all. Comprised of one of Hammond's layered monochrome paintings leaning against a wall and a collection of re-made handcrafted furniture by Cape, the two works are somewhat independent of each other, but their proximity yields a new conversation between the works. Their pairing seems more like a very astute curatorial choice, rather than a true collaboration that results in one unified work.

Amy Cutler, installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and SITE Santa Fe. Photo: Eric Swanson.

While Hammond and Cape's collaboration demonstrates restraint and subtlety, Amy Cutler's installation commits the sin of sensorial overload. Created with musician Emily Wells and hairdresser Adriana Papaleo, the installation sets out to devise a three-dimensional version of one of Cutler's surreal paintings. Braided hair intertwined between aspen logs that form a primitive hut in the center of the gallery, lit from within, houses bundled lumps of more hair. An eerie soundtrack of breathing permeates the dark atmosphere. The ambience is meticulously crafted, but the literalness of such a proposal deprives the viewer of the sense of imagination and wonderment one can experience in the scenes of Cutler's strange and richly detailed paintings.

Ann Hamilton, The common SENSE, 2014-2015, installation view, SITE Santa Fe, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Eric Swanson.

At turns impressive, delightful, and poignant, Ann Hamilton's installation is one of the most richly rewarding of the show. Created in cooperation with the University of Washington's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture's Ornithology collection, the common SENSE · the animals (2014-2015) is comprised of digital scans of bird and animal specimens taken from the collection, printed on stacks of newsprint, and presented salon style across the whole room. Invited to tear off sheets of the newsprint and take some of the pictures home, viewers are confronted with the consequences of their impulse to consume--as each sheet is torn away, the installation is lessened, pointing to the ultimate finitude of natural resources. In the wake of the tragedy of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, Hamilton's installation becomes all the more moving.

Marie Watt, installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and SITE Santa Fe. Photo: Eric Swanson.

The emphasis on collaboration at SITE Santa Fe is not a passing fancy, or just relevant to this particular exhibition, but rather is something that runs deep within the institution's programming and curatorial mission. This is evidenced in a concurrent exhibition at the museum, Unsuspected Possibilities, supported by a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant, featuring works by Marie Watt, Leonardo Drew, and Sarah Oppenheimer. Marie Watt's installation in particular perfectly and beautifully illustrates SITE Santa Fe's continued commitment to collaborative processes and community engagement. The artist, who is of Iroquois descent, involved local Santa Fe students and community members to help embroider designs on fragments of Pendleton blankets, which were then assembled into magnificent constructions, and hung like an advancing regiment through the gallery space. It's a breathtaking installation, made all the more impressive knowing the many hands that touched it.

--Natalie Hegert



Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot