Arch- A Passage Formed By A Curve, 2020, adobe mud and graphite on paper, 60 X 96 inches.
Arch- A Passage Formed By A Curve (detail), 2020. Photo by Scott Massey.
Pillars- An Act of Decompression, 2020, adobe mud and graphite on paper, 60 X 96 inches.
Mound- Angle of Integration, 2020, adobe mud and graphite on paper, 60 X 96 inches.
The Eaters, 2020, adobe mud, masking tape, postcard, steel, dimensions variable.
The Eaters (detail), 2020. Photo by Scott Massey.
A wall is a shadow on the land, 2020, adobe mud and graphite on paper, 60 X 96 inches.
A wall is a shadow on the land (detail), 2020. Photo by Scott Massey.
A wall is a shadow on the land, 2021
Co-curated by Julia Lamare and Kimberly Phillips
Vancouver, BC
In a meditation on land, language and architecture, Vancouver-based Chalon Ohlone and Hispanic artist Christine Howard Sandoval re-considers the insidious meaning-making power of the archive in her solo exhibition A wall is a shadow on the land. Through the use of adobe, a desert building material made from clay, sand and soil and deeply connected to her own family’s histories and practices, Howard Sandoval considers how land is and has been inhabited, the stories embedded in it and the potential futures it holds.
Howard Sandoval reconfigures the typology of Spanish mission architecture in a series of new adobe sculptures and large-scale drawings. Brought together with archival documents and the artist’s own fourth-grade school report on the California missions, she works to dislodge the deep-rooted colonial fictions that narrate the histories of her ancestral homeland in Alta California. A wall is a shadow on the land points to the ways in which narratives of colonial erasure are rehearsed within the public school system, and how the ongoing physical presence of mission sites on unceded Indigenous land in the western US are markers of the systemic proliferation of the imperial project and its persistent conditions today.
Text by Julia Lamare + Kimberly Phillips
Photography by Rachel Topham Photography