CHANGING STATES OF MATTER
Changing States of Matter features new sculpture and installation work by Houston-based artists Hillaree Hamblin and Grace Zuùiga, who explore the embodiment of memory, narrative, and time through the methodic manipulation of materials. The artists interweave artificial substances like plastics, foam, and resin with raw materials like wood, metals, and thread, distilling poetic qualities from within. Animating these materials through ritualized processes of dipping, spraying, stretching, and molding, the artists carefully guide selected matter into new states of being. These transformed objects preserve the stories of their own becoming, while also reflecting the artists’ personal memories and offering moments of introspection. Hillaree Hamblin collects and builds curious assemblages that she morphs into mutant crystalline shrines. Each object has its own formation narrative showing physical traces of its manipulation and growth, including tenacious crevices, dimples, and glops. Grace Zuùiga conjures considered, unyielding microcosms that display reverence to the materials they contain. Akin to altars, these mysterious fibrous systems seek meaning beyond their evolving layered forms.
Cultural Production in the Anthropocene by Christopher Beer The anthropocene is a scientific term that refers to the measureable and lasting presence humans have imposed on the Earth since the industrial revolution. The by-products of technological innovation, disposable plastics, automobile emissions, and power plant waste will last far beyond our day-to-day measures of time, extending to a timeframe of geologic proportion. Bending nature to our will is proving to have lasting effect on our way of life—climate change feeds extreme storms, excess waste clogs our oceans and airways, increasing global need for clean water to drink and air to breathe. Scientists are coming up with new terms for plastics embedded in rocks, as plastiglomerates are now preserved in the geological record. We trade our future freedoms for these momentary comforts in our now. As artists engage in this world, they cannot turn a blind eye to the environmental systems that are evolving to increasing complexity every day. Even if their cultural production does not directly comment on the anthropomorphic phenomenon itself, themes wrap themselves up in the symptoms: consumption, collection, memory, transition, hierarchy, interaction, site, and sustainability. In Changing States of Matter, Hamblin and Zuñiga’s work engages with time and human experience through two modes of perception—with a macro-lens in the anthropomorphic sense, while also zooming in to engage with a more personal set of layered histories and experiences that are autobiographical and current. Zuñiga works in multiples, creating a rhythm through her installations that transcend to moments of introspection. She works to pinpoint her place in the universe through the
objects she crafts. Through these meditations she is able to alter materials like wood, glue, clay and raw carbon into natural systems of order that invite freeform narratives to emerge, all linked to the hand of the maker. Hamblin collects detritus from her past productions—paint chips, bits of foam, crystals, and found objects—and reformats them into a multitude of metamorphic beings that manifest a rich strata to be mined by viewers. Elements that have been honed over time produce an intersection of her individual state of being and the challenges we all face in finding purpose in our daily experience. While the essence of each artist is revealed through their practice, another commonality emerges—an engagement with time offered by their choice of materials. The skins they fabricate relate a sense of order, collection, fragility, and life. They are made with materials familiar to us at the beginning of this geological epoch. Raw carbon and plastic bits present in their cast films parallel the experience of coating the Earth in these same materials. As both artists create these relics of experience, the work serves as a reflection of the anthropocene, separated only by scale. As each artist sends their materials through a process of manual production, there is a reliance on synthetic materials to help bind, secure, and bring life to their forms of introspective experience. Over time these materials will succumb to nature, transitioning to their next form, yet still maintaining their essential state for thousands of years to come. The compositions they create, using modern building blocks of our world, invite a confrontation with the status quo, excavating new realities to ponder. It is through intentional choices in material, composition, display, and personal narrative that these artists provide insight, allowing us to think deeper about our current paradigm of existence and what could be next for the planet we call home.
“When I conceive my work, I think about creating my own sacred objects, geography, and sense of time.”
Grace Zuñiga
Fuse, Freeze, Sublimate by Kelly Johnson In our cyclical world, everything informs the becoming of something else. A memento, idea, action, or feeling circulates through rhythms of experience, transformed into its next state of being. This movement of energy through cycles is present across many aspects of life—in laws of physics, biologcal and environmental systems, historical trajectories, sociological phenomena, spiritual traditions, and within the individual experience of consciousness. Memory too follows this circuitous path, changing states along the way. It may begin far off, disembodied yet mobile, like vapor. In the right conditions it condenses, becoming heavier and cohering cleanly like droplets of water or muddled like a soupy glue. Upon further concentration, memory distills and becomes dense, solidifying and often inhabiting a singular object or material. A memory can repeat and reverse through these stages ad infinitum—orbiting the process as slowly as the span a lifetime, or evaporating within seconds. No matter the phase, whether holding in one state or transforming into another, each manifestation of memory serves as a sacred portal—a navigational tool for crossing time and space, a bridge between finality and potential. When maintaining a solid form, memory and matter embodied in materials receptive to physical and
chemical forces become further charged. Wearing dimples and scars from transfers of energy, the created object becomes a body with its own unique narrative of lived experience and growth. This cyclical imprinting flows from source to object, artist to material, and memory to matter, creating a living portrait or memorial for particular important impressions. Materializing memory looks like: kitchen heirlooms woven through generations of wise hands / holding rocks, mounds and roots of the west coast / building altars of balance to the mysterious and the familial / antique glass bottles and stories emerging from rain soaked land / rising water, 50 inches / threads of matters past, released from their retired forms, meeting heat, pressure, and time, labor and care to become: slathered milky grains of salt / chalky peels of charcoal lace / sedimentary specimen of colorful acrylics / wavy traces of wet porcelain / scrunched, bubbling pinned plastics / and golden digits stuck in carbon mortar. These considered outputs by Hamblin and Zuñiga establish a lineage of personal material history that honors our collective cyclical existence and provides space for continued evolution of these specific bodies of memory. While currently experiencing this state of matter—in this form, with these materials, and this set of moments —the flow of potential energy remains poised to transition all of us into the next.
“Through experimentation and play, these materials seem to remember all of the positions and forms they took. They sometimes misbehave and rebel, resulting in oddly sensuous and quirky formations.�
Hillaree Hamblin
Grace ZuĂąiga
Cover : Detail of Olas (carbon, glue, thread) Pg 3 : Detail of Mantelitos (carbon, glue) Pg 8 : Reverberated recollection (porcelain on paper) This Page : From One to Another (resin, gold leaf, carbon) Back Cover : Detail of Counted Blessings (porcelain, thread)
Hillaree Hamblin
Cover : Detail of Glitzy (acrylic, glitter) Pg 1 : Detail of Starburst (spray paint, acrylic, salt wash and plastic) Pg 4 : Detail of Untitled (insulation foam, acrylic) Pg 11 : Little Blob (wood, nails, acrylic, thread) This Page : Detail of From the 90s (acrylic, beads)
box 13 ARTSPACE Jan 27 - Mar 3, 2018 ARTWork by Hillaree Hamblin hillareehamblin.com
Grace ZuĂąiga
gracezuniga.com
Curated by Christopher Beer
christopherbeer.studio
Kelly Johnson
kellymjohnson.net