Featuring artworks by an international and multigenerational group of artists, Like Water considers landscape simultaneously as a material, physical condition, and an interior emotional state. The exhibition addresses water in multiple ways—from its life-giving and destructive powers, to the Mississippi River and its tributaries, fonts (of inspiration), floods (of emotion), climate change, leakiness, and the Middle Passage. Like Water will fill the museum with sculpture, video, ceramics, drawing, textiles, collages, and paintings—each artist approaching the subject of water and fluidity in deeply individual ways.
Multidisciplinary artist Jamal Cyrus transforms mundane materials—denim, vinyl, and musical instruments—into objects with densely-packed networks of meaning and references to the US colonial trade, the Middle Passage, and Blues music. Candice Lin’s practice—spanning ceramics, built environments, assemblage and drawing—critically exposes histories of colonization, extraction, consumption, and exploitation. Her unique installation for CAM celebrates the decay, leaks, sputtering, and disintegration of materials, offering an analogue for the dissolution of oppressive systems. With films and video that amplify and expand cultural histories, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s work explores the Classical Greek myth of Philoctetes as it questions Puerto Rico’s “left-behind” colonial relationship with the US, and its challenges due to hurricanes and rising sea levels.
Immersing viewers in dense cascades of un-stretched canvases suspended from ceilings and walls, Vivian Suter’s colorful, gestural paintings evoke fluidity both in their application of liquid acrylics and as they slide between abstraction and representation. For Dionne Lee, water is a wilderness that holds dueling forces of safety and danger. Lee’s meditative videos and collaged photographic prints mine hidden histories. Simone Fattal’s earliest ceramic sculptures—inspired by a sculpture known as the Amorite Spring Goddess—appear with her other ceramic and cast bronze figures, charting a sinuous course through the museum into its courtyard.
With stories and ideas that have been shaped by and through this life-sustaining element, Like Water encourages viewers to reflect on water’s emotional and poetic resonances, and the changing cultural, ecological, and sociopolitical ecosystems in which we circulate.
Like Water is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator.
