Cassils & Erika Wanenmacher
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Cassils & Erika Wanenmacher at SITE SANTA FE

SITE SANTA FE opens Cassils: Movements and Erika Wanenmacher: what Time Travel feels like, sometimes with food by Marigold Kitchen, drinks by Tumbleroot, and music by Sonny Goodnight aka syunsxyuna.

Fri, Nov 15 2024, 5–9 PM

Free, no advanced registration required.

what Time Travel feels like, sometimes

Erika Wanenmacher uses autobiography and visual storytelling to unravel universal narratives. The New Mexico-based artist’s studio practice is influenced by a punk and DIY ethos, with unexpected materials sourced from thrift stores, dumps, and walks through nearby arroyos—sites where history, memory, and imagination converge. In Wanenmacher’s hands, time is cyclical, fragmented, and fluid—mirroring the materials she selects and the intuitive process that defines her work.what Time Travel feels like, sometimes, is a non-linear allegory in the form of an exhibition, reflecting Wanenmacher’s guiding concepts such as cellular memory, science fiction, consciousness, witchcraft, and the intelligence of nature. The notion of “time travel” serves as a throughline, challenging conventional notions of both time and place.

On view is a selection of paintings, prints, sculptures, videos, and installations from the past seven years. The exhibition features Wanenmacher’s latest monumental sculptures, crafted from found glass she gathered during meditative walks in the New Mexico landscape. These pieces of glass possess a distinctive iridescence, their colors forged when glass is buried in the earth over decades or is incinerated with metals. Each shard of aged glass becomes both medium and muse, maintaining links to the land and its pressured past. These artifacts—imbued with histories of utility, abandonment, and metamorphosis—materialize the temporal complexities of her layered process.

Wanenmacher’s artistic process is unapologetically intertwined with her spiritual journey. Her works are not mere objects but vessels of intent, made to harbor a transformative power akin to casting spells. For her, art objects made with purpose “carry a resonance that can shift energy, power, and beliefs. Clear intent focused by will and imagination are the components of a spell. I make spells in the form of objects.”

Movements

Cassils’s work positions their body as both the raw material and protagonist of their performances. For the Canadian-born, New York- and Los Angeles-based artist, performance is a form of social sculpture, reflecting how bodies are shaped by external forces and social expectations. Cassils’s art contemplates the histories of LGBTQI+ representation, struggle, survival, and empowerment. Employing a myriad of visual tactics—outlines and silhouettes, solar exposures, retinal burns, flashes, and Rorschach devices—the artist aims to complicate the conditions of trans* visibility in a moment of heightened violence.Movements transposes the live choreography of Cassils’s debut contemporary dance piece, Human Measure (2022), reconceiving that performance as three new immersive installations that are distinct yet interconnected. Drawing upon the structure of a musical score, the exhibition weaves layered auditory experiences into a sweeping soundscape that spans the galleries’ architecture.

At its core, the exhibition interrogates the act of recording and preserving performance, questioning how the body is framed, mediated, and ultimately reinterpreted. Through cinematic approaches—whether in the motion of the frame or the stylistic choices that shape it—Movements examines how formal decisions affect our understanding of trans* subjectivity. Here, movement is not only physical but reverberates socially, politically, and physiologically, shifting between the intimate and the public, the seen and the unseen.

Each movement occupies a single gallery and explores a world. Movement I (Human Measure) draws on the legacies of experimental film by transforming dance documentation into an abstraction. Movement II (Half Life) silhouettes bodies performing rites of life and death against the shimmering dunes of White Sands National Park. Movement III (Etched in Light, National Mall, Washington DC) documents a sonic and visual performance created in collaboration with the National Center for Transgender Equality on the Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31, 2024), presented alongside a sixty-foot cyanotype made during this participatory event.

Movements disrupts the process of looking, compelling viewers to become conscious of their gaze. By challenging the assumption that looking is neutral, Cassils opens a space for deeper inquiry, where questions of perception, power, and representation intersect. Through this disruption, the installations invite us to reconsider how we see, revealing the politics embedded in the very act of witnessing.