Earthshaker
Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, & P. Staff
Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica, CA
February 18 - April 18, 2025
What makes Mendieta, Jarman, and Staff suited to such enduring correlation and comparison is their shared capacity to remain porous to their persistently evolving environment. Each absorbs, reflects, and refracts the earth—whether raw and volcanic, deserted and nuclear, or exploited and poisonous—with concern for its physical and psychic implications and its metaphysical and metamorphic potential. Denatured and renatured through heat, smoke, fire, and acid, they reveal the earth/body as a site of perpetual becoming and self-shattering unknowability. Earthshaker is an exhibition and a map, charting new relationships between the (al)chemical body and the (al)chemical world. The map begins with us and leads towards the unknown future. The artists involved do not take these ideas as mere subject matter but lived reality, leveraging different forms of technology, chemical experimentation, and their own queer flesh as sites of regeneration, complexity, and the birth of possibility on a planet poisoned with itself.