No burden as heavy

No burden as heavy considers the weight of history, invoking the present as a landscape imprinted upon by the gestures, values and practices of the past. The exhibition traces the digressing and rhizomatic nature of historical narrative as the malleable material of contemporary interpretation, able to be revisited, remembered and redefined through individual and collective reference. French philosopher Paul Valéry cautioned towards the susceptibility of history and its utility as an artifact of retrospection: “History is the most dangerous product that the chemistry of the intellect has invented… History can justify anything. It can teach nothing with restraint, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.”

New media theorist Eduardo Navas pushes further with this premise, and considers the sampling and restructuring of history—“remixing”— as a discursive form of its own. Approaching reference as both medium and message, the eleven gallery artists look towards history as a personal condition to be picked over, harnessed and provoked through material and conceptual juxtapositions. Jonquil (2017) and Narcissus (2017), two works in the exhibition by Sanford Biggers, amalgamate references from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Greek myth and Japanese origami, reaching across time and place in a nuanced flattening of history. Quisqueya Henriquez explores the history of art itself, looking back along the past century of artistic production where she pieces together familiar references from along, and beyond, the Western canon. Treating history as an artifact of individual experience, Pepe Mar traces a personal narrative in Patchwork Patty (2017). Drawing from the artist’s own 15-year oeuvre which marries colorful sculpture with media-driven collage, the work is composed from a series of custom textiles printed with images from his practice. And Jillian Mayer inverts the paradigm of history as a linear equation of cause and effect, speculating upon possible futures from conditions both present and past. 

No burden as heavy reflects upon history as a collective condition that seeps into, shapes and informs all aspects of the cultural imagination. The exhibition’s artists draw from the slippage between the past’s various threads, their records, and how this information is relayed and understood today. No burden as heavy collapses the linearity of time—past to present—into a comprehensive and flattened understanding of now.