Earthshaker at Del Vaz Projects

Earthshaker (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artists and Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica. Photo: Paul Salveson.

In entering the galleries of Del Vaz Projects’ recent exhibition Earthshaker, one ceded a certain degree of control. Across two rooms, the three-person exhibition paired photographs and films with collages and paintings, an assemblage of works dramatically cloaked in darkness for the duration of an illuminated video installation by P. Staff. But even when the lights went up, the works on display were reluctant to disclose their subjects—each one contained a sense of lack. What was withheld carried as much weight as what appeared in Earthshaker, which paired pieces from Ana Mendieta’s archive with works by Derek Jarman and Staff to explore the ways the trio of artists disseminated their embodied experiences across time and space. Despite their overt omissions, the works on display functioned as oblique self-portraits, and the installation invited intimate reflection on the artists’ practices and personhood.

In the second room of the gallery, Mendieta’s Untitled (Silueta Series) (1978) animated the artist’s process on film. Offered as a postscript to the photographs of her static Siluetas, the film reframes her oeuvre as a series of performances. Mendieta’s most iconic photographs seem to belie their fragile subject matter, freezing her silhouette in a singular moment. Seeing her performance in motion, one is reminded that process undergirded Mendieta’s practice: the ritual recreation of the body’s outline across landscapes which inevitably erase it, leaving only a trace rendered on film.

The single, 3:14 minute reel, played on repeat, captures Mendieta’s silhouette traced in gunpowder and ignited, the chemical burn illuminating her shape before obscuring it in smoke. To watch her film on an endless loop is to encounter her process as Mendieta herself might have, drawing closer to the artist’s own vantage point as we witness the creation and erosion of a sculpture made permeable to the elements.

If Mendieta’s practice took motion in Earthshaker, the pieces on display by Jarman might have seemed to distill his films into a fixed medium. In the final years of his life, Jarman created his Black Paintings (1986–93), small canvases of collected ephemera coated in layers of lead and tar. Following his diagnosis with HIV in 1986, Jarman moved to a cottage on the coast of Kent, situated in the shadow of a nuclear reactor, where he foraged for seeds, stones, and reclaimed industrial materials.¹ The nuclear garden, like the body of the AIDS patient, is inscribed with decay but persists in producing new forms of life. As Jarman’s illness progressed and his eyesight began to fade, the compressed color palette of his final films and paintings conveyed the limitations of his own physical form to his viewers, inviting different modes of seeing through their omissions.²

In Black Wedding (1987), a bullet casing and a wedding ring are embedded in a paper fan, their familiar forms legible in silhouette through the cracked black impasto surface. To encounter Jarman’s collected objects recast in shades of black is to imagine an environment known purely through touch; it is an invitation to inhabit, however temporarily, the tactile world of a sightless body. As his vision diminished and the flat images of the film camera which shaped his previous work grew increasingly inaccessible for Jarman, his collages constituted an alternate mode of worldmaking. Like Mendieta’s works, Jarman’s collages seem to speak most clearly through their constrictions, an echo of the artist’s embodied experience resounding decades after his death.

In Staff’s video installation In Ekstase (2023), mechanism and message are bound together: Five repurposed holographic fans drew a current of air through the gallery, their blades blurring into an opaque shape, overlaid with a flickering sequence of neon spheres and poetic fragments. Staff’s work is often read as an attempt to replicate the dysphoria of the marginal subject, but here it also spoke to the fragmentation of identity itself.³ The disparate elements of language and the blades of the fan only cohere into a single entity, capable of displaying a legible message, for a few glowing moments. When the work flashes “are you feeling it,” it invokes its own speaker’s disembodied subjectivity as well as the viewer’s ambiguous affect.

If Staff was transmitting an identity here, it is a fractured one, dispersed across the gallery in reflections on the glossy surfaces of Jarman and Mendieta’s works. While their projects grant access to the artist’s embodied experiences, Staff’s work affords a certain intimacy with the self which remains unstable, inviting us to glimpse the immense effort undergirding the public performance of identity. The work’s refusal to resolve into a coherent subject is itself a form of disclosure.

Across the assembled works in Earthshaker, we encountered a bodily vulnerability manifested mostly in overt omissions, where an excised sense allowed us to approximate an artist’s fading sight and an ad-hoc documentary reminded us of performance’s precarity. We came closest to the artists when we brushed up against their limitations, witnessing a subjectivity that only lasted as long as a flash of light against the wall.