The Tip of My Tongue, The Spaces Between Us.

The bodies of work presented by artists Carolina Larrosa, Vân Thúy Lê, and Leah Watts constitute poetic vessels carrying histories of encounters while tracing colonial contours. Water, language and spider webs are flexible materials; they are fluid and adaptable while embodying time's abstracted materiality. They also trace an epistemology of movements, connecting spaces while facilitating points of re-territorialization. Inspired by a Cree legend, Leah Watts's multimedia work, A Conversation with Spider Woman (Or to Catch a Spider in Its Own Web), is a conduit to explore notions of refusal and cultural preservation by underlining the imperialistic impulses to extract resources from territories to culture. Carolina Larossa's installation El agua entre nosotros es un ser (“The Water Between Us is a Being”) investigates the plurality of the Cuban diasporas and their close relationship to the Caribbean coasts and waters: and more specifically, through the lens of the mass migration period of the 1990s. Discursively, Larrosa and Lê invite the audience to consider how border culture resonates between bodies, land, and memories. The photographic series Dưới, by Vân Thúy Lê, retrospectively looks at the formulation of the Vietnamese alphabet and linguistic transformations to excavate stories of colonial violence, inherited hauntings, archival erasure, and tales of resistance. 

- Geneviève Wallen, Exhibition Coordinator