EARTHSHAKER
ANA MENDIETA, DEREK JARMAN & P. STAFF
DEL VAZ PROJECTS
FEBRUARY 19-APRIL 19, 2025
On the occasion of their ten-year anniversary, Del Vaz Projects is excited to announce Earthshaker, a groundbreaking exhibition featuring visionary works by Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Staff—opening at DVP’s gallery space in Santa Monica, California, in February 2025. Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan, this show marks the first time these artists will be exhibited together—placing three distinct voices in dialogue across geographies, generations, and gender expressions. Earthshaker stirs with a hybrid alchemy, an exploration of what it means to conjure, and then dissolve, those divisions that distinguish—and thus distort—the body as separate from the earth. Seeding the corporeal with the liminal, Mendieta, Jarman, and Staff cast visions at once mystical and chemical—queering language, limb, and land in order to place us in the unlocatable, or as bell hooks once described, “queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
Created in cooperation with the Estate of Ana Mendieta, Alison Jacques London, the Keith Collins Trust, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, James Mackay, Commonwealth & Council, and in close collaboration with Staff—who lives and works in Los Angeles—Earthshaker is a monumental convergence of multidisciplinary practice. For Mendieta, this exhibition marks the first significant presentation of the artist’s Silueta Series in Los Angeles since her solo show at MOCA in 1998, expanding the scope of her traveling retrospective Search for Origin—first presented at the MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier, France, in 2023. For Jarman, Earthshaker will be the U.S. debut of his “Black Paintings” and the painting Acid Rain—first shown in Evil Queen at The Whitworth, Manchester, England, in 1994. For Staff, this will be the U.S. debut of their acclaimed recent work In Ekstase, a holographic projection presented at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2023 and recently acquired by the Whitney Museum, as well as sculptural elements from the site-specific installation On Venus, which premiered at the Serpentine Galleries in 2019.
Earthshaker will be accompanied by the release of DVP’s fifth and most ambitious publication to date, an eponymous exhibition catalog featuring critical essays authored by the international trailblazing scholars and writers Eva Hayward, Maxi Wallenhorst, and McKenzie Wark.
Transcending the exhibition’s walls, DVP will partner with cultural institutions across Los Angeles to host a robust slate of public programs, including a solo screening of Mendieta’s Super 8 films at the Hammer Museum on Thursday, January 23, 2025 followed by a discussion with Raquel Cecilia Mendieta; a screening of Derek Jarman's The Garden (1990) on Thursday, March 20, 2025 at Del Vaz Projects; and a group screening of rarely and never-before-seen moving-image works by Mendieta, Jarman, and Staff at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) on Sunday, April 6, 2025 followed by a discussion with curator Chrissie Iles.
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Major support for Earthshaker at Del Vaz Projects is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Karen Hillenburg, and Jarl & Pamela Mohn.
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Image: P. Staff, In Ekstase, 2023, installation view, in: P. Staff, In Ekstase, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, © P. Staff. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Basel. Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel. ​