Water is Thicker than Blood

WATER IS THICKER THAN BLOOD CURATED BY EXHIBITION DATES

Rachel Poonsiriwong January 7–February 12, 2022

Installation shot

by Graham Holoch

Water is Thicker than Blood explores the complexities of intergenerational and familial traumas alongside pathways to healing. This group exhibition highlights artists whose work has nurtured vulnerable spaces that reflect on emotional, cultural, or geographical rifts.

At its heart, Water is Thicker than Blood investigates the weaving of trauma into domesticity and genealogical systems. On a personal level, the pieces featured in Water is Thicker than Blood carry artists’ intimate expressions of grief, longing, and discomfort. Collectively, this exhibition surfaces the intersectionality of familial rifts and traumas with many immigrant and diasporic experiences. Works in the show aim to acknowledge the shared trauma experienced by many families as a byproduct of institutional failures during the pandemic.

Water is Thicker than Blood is an intermixture of healing practices and a coming-to-terms—each piece a personal insight into an artist’s memory.

The show is most fully experienced as a gift, in which viewers honor and reciprocate the vulnerability that each artist has invested into their work.

In a similar vein, viewers will have an opportunity to converse with the pieces as gateways for processing and articulating their own intergenerational traumas.

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Detail of: Pallavi Sharma Lakadi ki kaathi (A Frame of Wood), 2021 Mixed media

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Nanci Amaka Kira Dominguez Hultgren Ghazal Ghazi Madeleine Ignon Ahn Lee Jennifer Lugris Deepa Mahajan Alicia McDaniel** & Sam Johnson Alexander Feliciano Mejía Lydia Nakashima Degarrod Elisa Ortega Montilla Susan Ossman tamara suarez porras Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera Pallavi Sharma Irene Wibawa ** Root Division Alum

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Detail of: Lydia Nakashima Degarrod Flowers of Memory, Family, and Dispersal, 2021 Handmade paper, embroidery, acrylic

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Curator’s Note by Rachel Poonsiriwong Wherever There Is Water, We Persevere by Grace Loh Prasad Nanci Amaka Kira Dominguez Hultgren Ghazal Ghazi Madeleine Ignon Ahn Lee Jennifer Lugris Deepa Mahajan Alicia McDaniel & Sam Johnson Alexander Feliciano Mejía Lydia Nakashima Degarrod Elisa Ortega Montilla Susan Ossman tamara suarez porras Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera Pallavi Sharma Irene Wibawa

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CURATOR’S NOTE

by Rachel Poonsiriwong

Collective trauma, in all its invisibility, is experienced and incarnated in a surprising variety of embodiments. As Paul Connerton puts it in How Societies Remember, “groups provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localized by a kind of mapping.” How are distressing events memorialized within diasporic cultures, and how are they assimilated into individual families’ relational fabrics?

Water is Thicker than Blood comes back to Diana Taylor’s Memory as Cultural Practice: Mestizaje, Hybridity, and Transculturation to center the concepts of “rift” and “repair” in trauma healing. The body of a mestizo, a mixed-race child of Indigenous-European descent, is posited by Taylor as “a constant state of transformation” where their archive (“I know texts, pages, illustrations’’) circulates with their repertoire of embodied knowledge (‘’I also retain memories that belonged to my grandmother, my mother, or my friends’’). As such, a mestizo’s internal reality draws consolidated references from two divergent cultures in an inherently corporeal manner.

Through the ruins of Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, Taylor also proposes that land is a site of cultural convergence. The ruins are described as a palimpsest of colonial histories, at which the ancient Aztec temple-pyramid’s cue stones were used to construct the zócalo (Mexico’s Spanish colonial administrative center). In other words, transcultural bodies and sites are formed through the deconstruction and reassembly of disparate cultures, etymologies, and political histories.

This exhibition reads beyond body and site to explore familial relationships as sites of dissension, where lineages soothe and chafe in progeny. The child is a galvanic web of veins mapped out by their ancestors’ deconstructed sociocultural fabrics. In Water is Thicker than Blood, intergenerational ties are now the palimpsest—where inherited traumas are eroded and reconstructed—in both the corpus and psyche. Through intersections with domesticity, racial issues, violence, and grief, this group show serves as an anthropological log of familial blueprints and a journal of vulnerable stories.

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painting memories one explores found family life within begins —A haiku reconstructed by unravelling this exhibition’s artist statements into a word cloud

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Detail of: Elisa Ortega Montilla 10.000 Km Away, 2019 Mixed media installation: reclaimed fabric with sand, driftwood, metal, Spanish tuna cans, olive oil, Spanish shoes 12

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We collaborated on this exhibition throughout the pandemic. In a particularly wearisome time, Water is Thicker than Blood served as a conduit between 2020 and 2022; real-life and art-world; insanity and normalcy; suffering and healing.

I hold a deep gratitude towards Michelle Mansour, Executive Director at Root Division, and Renée Rhodes, Art Programs Manager at Root Division, for their continued guidance in realizing this exhibition despite global uncertainties. I thank Phi Tran, Michael T. T. Nguyen and Ronaldo Reyes for their support in the catalogue design and installation work surrounding Water is Thicker than Blood, and I thank Grace Loh Prasad for contributing their vision by being our talented guest essayist. My appreciation extends to Berny Tan, a Singaporean curator who has assisted me with my research. I am also grateful to Kevin Chen for their valuable wisdom in helping me refine this curatorial project. Additionally, I thank my community at the Asian American Women Artists Association, California College of the Arts, Scale AI, ShelterTech and the San Francisco Global Shapers.

Most of all, Water is Thicker than Blood owes its success to the participating artists who have dedicated countless years to their craft. Thank you for believing in this project and trusting me with your work.

My curatorial journey is filled with endless support. I thank my mother and some of my closest friends—Emma Rutkowski, Jerry Cheung, Sanuree Gomes, Mita Elan, Nicole Aw, Jen Wu, Jenai Akina, Gina Kim and Kat Alfaro, among many others. Thank you for weathering out the last two years with me, loving me, and supporting my craziest ambitions.

Last but not least, thank you, Water is Thicker than Blood, for a life-changing endeavor into my own personal healing.

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WHEREVER THERE IS WATER, WE PERSEVERE

by Grace Loh Prasad

The expression “blood is thicker than water” suggests an unbreakable bond between families even when separated by geography, politics, or religion— implying that there is an intrinsic wholeness or sense of belonging with kin. While it’s a noble sentiment, it underestimates the obstacles that divide families and overlooks the scar tissue that forms when one is subjected to repeated injury, whether it’s historical (war, displacement, colonization) or personal trauma stemming from abuse, estrangement, illness, or violence perpetrated by those closest to us.

By conceptualizing an exhibit around the theme Water Is Thicker Than Blood, curator Rachel Poonsiriwong challenges this common refrain and asks us to consider a more nuanced understanding where distance is both a wound and a blessing, and borders and boundaries can be a choice for survival. Water is a powerful symbol for immigrants: it evokes the vastness of the ocean that separates families in the diaspora. It is both conduit and barrier, at once connecting and dividing us, a force that is life-giving yet also destructive.

Seeds are an equally potent symbol for travel and mobility, another key theme of the exhibit. The delicate handmade paper flowers of Lydia Nakashima Degarrod evoke the beauty and fragility of life and the dispersion, estrangement, and survival of generations of her family through war and upheaval on three continents. The flowers are a reminder that new life can grow after tragedy, even in the harshest of conditions, and that wherever there is water we can persevere. Susan Ossman’s textile piece Watermark is made of painted silk organza and includes actual seeds, soil, and pebbles. The transparent layered organza represents the layers of meaning, transmitted from one generation to the next, with rips and cut— reminding us that the fabric of memory is both delicate and resilient.

Layers also show up in Deepa Mahajan’s richly textured collages that merge maps and anatomical drawings, showing how culture and identity are imprinted on our skin and even inside us. The places we’ve lived become an

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inseparable part of us, as undeniable as a bloodline. Families also reproduce and transmit their unique language and stories—but also intergenerational trauma and grief from historical injustices. The portraits of Jennifer Lugris honor the sacrifices made by mothers to keep their children safe and the eternal hope that fleeing political persecution will provide a better life. She gives voice and visibility to those unseen—her formerly undocumented mother and her masked, multiracial toddler growing up in the age of COVID-19. Ghazal Ghazi’s portraits have a similar impulse, using the aesthetics of traditional Persian miniature painting to reclaim the dignity of immigrants of SWANA descent, who are forced out of their home countries and then oppressed and marginalized in their adopted countries. Ghazi refers to this condition of precarity as “dual (un)belongings.”

Many of the artists in Water Is Thicker Than Blood make a point to center those who are otherwise missing or invisible, whether it’s the spirit of a mysterious great aunt rumored to have mental illness in Irene Wibawa’s birdlike sculptures; tamara suarez porras’s letters and photos of a father they never met; or the unseen child trying to send a coded message about domestic abuse through a boom box in Alicia McDaniel and Sam Johnson’s collaborative installation.

In their own way, each artist grapples with vulnerability and loss. In Alexander Feliciano Mejia’s digitization of a long-forgotten home video, it’s the loss of time and the sadness of greetings delivered decades late. In Elisa Ortega Montilla’s installation, reclaimed textiles sag with the weight of objects representing what she’s left behind, including soil from California and pantry items that represent her Spanish heritage. In Nanci Amaka’s ritualistic photos and recordings of her pregnancy and labor, she becomes her own witness to an initiation into motherhood, standing in for her absent mother who was violently murdered when Amaka was a child. Although the works in this exhibit often reference the pain, separation, and grief of immigrant families, by having the courage to tell these stories, they each also carry the seed of their own healing and growth.

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NANCI AMAKA

Pillar, 2019 Archival photo print on Hahnemuhle photo rag pearl 320 gsm 33 x 44 in.

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Water is Thicker than Blood, 2021 Wool (handspun, hand-dyed, industrial); silk (yarn, rope); nylon (yarn, rope, webbing); linen; cotton; metal (d-rings, eye bolts, nails); acrylic (yarn, loom bars); wood (frame loom) 108 x 108 x 54 in.

Artwork courtesy of Eleanor Harwood Gallery 18

KIRA DOMINGUEZ HULTGREN

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GHAZAL GHAZI

If you don’t leave here you’ll die, 2021 Oil on canvas, thread 84 x 65 in.

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The History of Power, 2021 Oil, linen, canvas, thread 83 x 66 in.

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exorcism, 2021 Acrylic, ink, flashe, and oil on paper 68 x 51.5 in.

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MADELEINE IGNON

afterlife conversation, 2019 Single channel video 3:37 mins

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AHN LEE

WITH: JAS LIN, KYOKO TAKENAKA, AIDAN JUNG

Cocoon, 2021 Single channel video documentation of live performance Duration variable

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JENNIFER LUGRIS

A Work in Progress, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 48 x 32 in.

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The Mother Who Never Smiled, 2021 Oil and acrylic on canvas 49 x 41 in.

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No. 4, 2015 Work on paper 19 x 14 in.

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No. 5, 2017 Work on paper 18 x 12 in.

DEEPA MAHAJAN

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ALICIA MCDANIEL & SAM JOHNSON

Reasons for Self-loathing, 2021 Single channel video & CD player remnants 10:00 mins / 5 x 9 x 7.5 in.

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ALEXANDER FELICIANO MEJÍA

A Family Production, 2021 Single channel video installation 3:16 mins 33

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LYDIA NAKASHIMA DEGARROD

Flowers of Memory, Family and Dispersal, 2021 Handmade papers, paper lithograph, embroidery, and acrylic Dimensions variable Family Memories of Hiroshima Flower of Coup d’etat Flower of Bombing 3 Flower of War 1-3 Flower of Family 1-3

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ELISA ORTEGA MONTILLA

10.000 Km Away, 2019 Mixed media installation: reclaimed fabric with sand, driftwood, metal, Spanish tuna cans, olive oil, Spanish shoes 60 x 56 x 6 in.

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SUSAN OSSMAN

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Watermark, 2021 Acrylic, poppy seed, ink, and paper on silk organza 262 x 42 in.

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JUAN CARLOS RODRÍGUEZ RIVERA

memories, 2021 Image transfer on tile 4 x 3 in. (ea. tile)

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Diasporic Memories, 2020 Acrylic 24 x 18 in.

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PALLAVI SHARMA

Lakadi ki kaathi (A Frame of Wood), 2021 Mixed media 60 x 48 x 48 in.

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TAMARA SUAREZ PORRAS

24 Frames, 2019 Pigment prints from super 8mm film stills 40 x 75 in.

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IRENE WIBAWA

yes, you, too, can fly, 2021 Mixed media 12 x 76 x 45 in.

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The Bird, 2019 Mixed media 72 x 36 x 36 in.

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ABOUT ROOT DIVISION

STAFF

CATALOGUE DESIGN

Michelle Mansour Renée Rhodes Michael Gabrielle Phi Tran Ronaldo Reyes Rachel Welles Benny Siam Bridgette Wilkerson

Executive Director Art Programs Manager Education Programs Manager Marketing & Design Manager Facilities & Installation Manager Operations Manager Youth Education Coordinator Marketing Coordinator

Phi Tran & Michael Nguyen Graham Holoch

Graphic Design Exhibition Documentation

1131 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 415.863.7668 | rootdivision.org

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MISSION

SUPPORTERS

Root Division is a visual arts non-profit in San Francisco that connects creativity and community through a dynamic ecosystem of arts education, exhibitions, and studios. Root Division’s mission is to empower artists, foster community service, inspire youth, and enrich the Bay Area through engagement in the visual arts. The organization is a launching pad for artists, a stepping-stone for educators and students, and a bridge for the general public to become involved in the arts.

Root Division is supported in part by a plethora of individual donors and by grants from National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Kimball Foundation, Fleishhacker Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Violet World Foundation, and Deutsche Bank.

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