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EARTHSHAKER

ANA MENDIETA, DEREK JARMAN & P. STAFF

DEL VAZ PROJECTS

FEBRUARY 18-APRIL 18, 2025

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Del Vaz Projects is pleased to present Earthshaker, an exhibition, publication, and public program series featuring artwork by Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), Derek Jarman (1942–1994), and P. Staff (b. 1987). While informed by divergent generations, geographies, and practices, Mendieta, Jarman, and Staff find common ground in their subversive existence—creating artwork that sows dissident bodies into natural and chemical environments as an act of defiance against definition, control, or expulsion by authoritarian systems. Through camouflage, collage, poetry, and chromatic manipulation—posed as parallel processes to metamorphosis, sublimation, incantation, ​and transmutation—these artists create mutable forms in which earth and body permeate one another and, in the course of their uncanny transfiguration, propose more deviant and transgressive ecologies. Seeding the corporeal with the alchemical, they conjure and then dissolve those divisions that distinguish, and thus distort, the body as separate from the earth—queering language, limb, and land to situate their audience in the irreconcilable. 

 

Ana Mendieta—an artist whose brief, groundbreaking career encapsulated drawing, film, photography, sculpture, site-specific installation, and moving-image media—experimented with diverse materials as a means of investigating and reimaging notions of disembodiment, displacement, and homeland, synthesizing her own experience of political asylum after she was forcibly relocated from Cuba to the United States at the age of twelve. Epitomized in her Silueta Series, Mendieta enmeshed her own physical form and, later, more universal corporeal forms into vast landscapes; in the still-image works on view, made between 1978 and 1980, she photographed silhouettes that are almost imperceptibly camouflaged into the mossy rock beds, muddy riverbanks, and overgrown forests of Iowa—where she lived from her adolescence through her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Iowa. In moving-image works like Untitled: Silueta Series (1978), she filmed an open field in which white gunpowder was poured along the outline of a body, ignited and left ablaze until the entire form was illuminated. Once the smoke cleared, a blackened, scorched scar was revealed on the ground—an ephemeral imprint of alchemical fusion. While Mendieta’s actions and experiments were conveyed through mediums like photography and video, her actual work was, in and of itself, the complete identification with and total subsummation into nature.  

        

Derek Jarman, the visionary British filmmaker, writer, painter, gardener, designer, and AIDS-rights activist, was a luminary of London’s counterculture in the late 1970s and 80s—protesting against Margaret Thatcher’s conservative governance through ecstatic and explicit depictions of queer life. In 1986, when Jarman was diagnosed with HIV, he bought an abandoned fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness, Kent, where he lived and cultivated a flourishing garden on the property’s desolate terrain, situated near a nuclear power station, until the end of his life. Reckoning with analogous implications of institutional violence against queer bodies and natural landscapes, from 1986–1993, Jarman composed the Black Paintings—Tenebrist canvases coated with tar or impasto and collaged with talismans of mortality, love, sex, faith, illness, exile, and nature. His gleaming surfaces recalled alchemist John Dee’s obsidian scrying mirrors, instruments for divination and communion with angels that symbolized melanosis—a process of refining black matter to create a philosopher’s stone. Incantations drafted from syringes, seeds, coffin nails, bibles, condoms, bullets, compasses, rosaries, stones, wedding rings, and shattered panes of glass inscribed with poetry, each work was a melancholic and mystical reliquary of anticipatory mourning. In his subsequent series, the Slogan Paintings, his confrontational, cunning voice returned with rightful vengeance; with palette knives and bare hands, he scrawled subverted double-entendres and catchphrases in order to reclaim rampant homophobic slurs and headlines. Acid Rain from 1992 is at once punning and piercing—conflating the release of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere with chiding critiques of Thatcher’s reign and those traumatic rashes scarring the flesh of AIDS victims. 

 

At the intersection of film, installation, and poetry, P. Staff’s interdisciplinary practice weaves theoretical phenomena, experimental media, and staged environments, through which they dissect themes ranging from biopolitics to trans-poetics, astrology, dance, and end-of-life care. Their work pulses with a fascination for how bodies—particularly those of people who are queer, trans, or disabled—are interpreted, regulated, and disciplined within violent, surveilled societies. Products of the site-specific installation On Venus at the Serpentine Galleries in 2019, Compensation and On Living, Still II, are composed of steel barrels onto which lactic acid leaked over their perpetually corroding surfaces from pressurized pipes hung throughout the gallery—just as all living species incrementally absorb the planet’s toxic environs until both reach the brink of collapse. Splayed and flattened, the barrels transform into scarred etchings, abstracted plates that galvanize Venus’s contradictory symbolism and circumstance—suspended between potion and poison, desire and desolation. In contrast to On Venus’ corrosive process, in To Live a Good Life VI (2022), Staff embalms a fluorescent print—a manipulated photograph of an unidentifiable body shrouded in accordance with an unclear ritual—in a resin cast; a fragmented constellation of personal and biological matter is encased in the resin’s film, preserving the image alongside the artists’ hair, dead insects, ash, and sulfur. Staff’s 2023 work, In Ekstase, is a five-channel video that rhythmically projects a poem across five holographic fans like a phantasmagoria of light and air. Darting and strobing to strain the eye, these projections inspire discordant, disorienting sensations that—not unlike a drug high—metastasize the poem’s descriptions of bodies undergoing a cataclysmic, hysterical euphoria. 

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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. 

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Publication

 

Earthshaker: Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman & P. Staff—an art book edited by Jay Ezra Nayssan and published by Del Vaz Projects with texts by Nayssan, Eva Hayward, Maxi Wallenhorst, and McKenzie Wark—is now available.

 

 

Programs

 

Film Screening of Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990)

Sunday, March 16, 2025, 7:00 PM, Del Vaz Projects

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Affirmation of Being: The Films of Ana Mendieta

Featuring a conversation between Raquel Cecilia Mendieta and Jay Ezra Nayssan

Thursday, March 27, 2025, 7:30 PM, Hammer Museum 

 

Poetry of Fire: Chromatic Experimentation in the Films of Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, & P. Staff

Featuring a conversation between P. Staff, Chrissie Iles, and Jay Ezra Nayssan 

Sunday, April 6, 2025, 3:00 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art | MOCA

 

 

Earthshaker’s exhibition, publication, and public programming were made possible through a Multi-year Program Support grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Karen Hillenburg; and MAC3 The Mohn Art Collective: MOCA, LACMA and The Hammer. This project would not be possible without invaluable exhibition support from David Shull, Martin Coppell, Alison Jacques, James Mackay, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Amanda Wilkinson. 

 

Ana Mendieta (b. Havana, Cuba, 1948; d. New York, New York, 1985) studied in the Painting and Intermedia programs at the University of Iowa, where she received an MA in 1972 and MFA in 1977. Her vast archive of multidisciplinary work has been preserved by the Estate of Ana Mendieta, Galerie Lelong & Co, and Alison Jacques, London. She has had solo exhibitions at the MUSAC, León (2024); SESC Pompéia, São Paulo (2023); MO.CO., Montpellier (2023); Cleveland Museum of Art (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); Art Institute of Chicago (2011); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens, Washington, D.C. (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998); New Museum, New York (1987); among others. Mendieta’s work is in the public collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundacion Jumex, Mexico City; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

 

Derek Jarman (b. Northwood, Middlesex, England, 1942; d. London, England, 1994) studied at King’s College London from 1960 to 1963 and the Slade School of Art from 1963 to 1967. Jarman has had solo exhibitions at Amanda Wilkinson, London (2023, 2019, 2017, 2013); David Zwirner, New York (2021); Le Crédac, Paris (2021); Manchester Art Gallery (2021, 1992); Garden Museum, London (2020); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); VOID, Derry (2019); Serpentine Galleries, London (2008, 1995); Whitworth Gallery, Manchester (1994); and City Art Gallery, Manchester (1992), among others. From 1971 to 1994, he created over three dozen experimental shorts—preserved by his friend and collaborator James Mackay with the assistance of the LUMA Foundation between 1994 and 2014. Jarman is widely recognized for his groundbreaking independent feature films Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978), The Tempest (1979), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1989), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), and Wittgenstein (1993). In the final decades of his life, he authored several books and memoirs, including Dancing Ledge (1984), Kicking the Pricks (1987), Modern Nature (1989–1990), Smiling in Slow Motion (1991–1994), At Your Own Risk (1992), and Chroma (1993). Jarman’s work is in public collections including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Britain, London; British Film Institute, London; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. In 2024, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures co-acquired Blue (1993)—his final film.


P. Staff (b. Bognor Regis, England, 1987) received their BA from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2009 and participated in the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London, in 2011. Staff has had solo exhibitions at Ordet, Milan (2024); Kunsthalle Basel (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2022); LUMA, Arles (2021); Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015). They have been featured in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); 59th Venice Biennale (2022); 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2021); Canal 47, New York (2021); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); and New Museum, New York (2017), and Gasworks, London (2016). Their work is in the collections of the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf; LUMA, Arles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Staff lives and works between London and Los Angeles.

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Image: Earthshaker: Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman & P. Staff at Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica. Installation View. Courtesy Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica. Photo: Paul Salveson

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