This first survey exhibition of the work of Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña traces her career to stage a conversation about discarded and displaced people, places, and things in a time of global climate change. The exhibition includes key installations, sculptures, texts, and videos from a multidisciplinary practice that has encompassed performance, sculpture, drawing, video, poetry, and site-specific installations over the course of the past forty years.
Working within the overlapping discourses of Conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices, Vicuña has long refused categorical distinctions, operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile. Her practice weaves together disparate artistic disciplines as well as cultural and social communities—with shared relationships to land and sea, and to the economic and environmental disparities of the twenty-first century.
The exhibition presents a large selection of Vicuña's precario (precarious) sculptures produced over the last four decades that feature found objects in lyrical juxtaposition, as well as a monumental hanging structure created out of materials scavenged from the ever-diminishing Louisiana coast. Reframing dematerialization as both a formal consequence of 1960s Conceptualism and radical climate change, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen examines a process that shapes public memory and responsibility.
