Zsonamaco

Zⓢonamaco

February 9 – 13, 2022

Booth C112

P·P·O·W is pleased to present new works by Guadalupe Maravilla, Carlos Motta, and Astrid Terrazas, alongside historical works by David Wojnarowicz.

Combining sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation, Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976) grounds his transdisciplinary practice in activism and healing. Engaging a wide variety of visual cultures, Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, referencing his unaccompanied, undocumented migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War. In his newest series, Tortilla Altars, Maravilla combines his signature fibrous material used throughout his sculptural works, most notably in his large-scale Disease Throwers, with conch shells sourced in Mexico, and his illustrated, dehydrated tortillas. Describing his use of the tortilla, Maravilla notes that this work is “inspired by Joya de Cerén, the archeological site in El Salvador that was covered by volcanic ash, preserving what are now 2000-year-old tortillas… The images on the tortillas serve as an index of migration, and depict objects related to displacement and healing trauma.” Maravilla received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Olso, Norway; and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Inaugural Fellowship, 2021; an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation & Ford Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, 2021; a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2019; Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space, 2019; Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, 2016; and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award, 2003. Seven Ancestral Stomachs, Maravilla’s first exhibition at PˑPˑOˑW, was reviewed in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and Forbes. He recently received the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award and will present a solo exhibition, Guadalupe Maravilla: Sound Botánica, at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Olso, Norway in March 2022. Maravilla’s work is currently on view in Crip Time, a group exhibition at Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, and in Luz y fuerza, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.

Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through visibility and representation. An archivist of repressed histories, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. The Fall of the Damned, Motta’s new, ongoing series of graphite drawings, explores the idea of mass-infection through the visual metaphor of the swarm. Featuring dense tangles of snakes, birds, hyenas and humans, these works allegorize dehumanization as a social consequence of sickness and disease. These violent and erotic drawings are informed by art historical depictions of hell as well as human barbarism, commenting on inhuman tendencies across many cultures to stigmatize illness by conflating heath and morality. Motta received his MFA from Bard College and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006. He has received grants from Art Matters, 2008; NYSCA, 2010; the Creative Capital Foundation, 2012; and the Kindle Project 2012. His work has been the subject of survey exhibitions including Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia in 2017 which traveled to Matucana100, Santiago, Chile in 2018 and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2015. His work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; and Museo de Arte de Banco de la República, Bogotá, Columbia; among others. In 2019, Motta was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department. Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms, a 20-year career monograph, was published by SKIRA in June 2020. In the fall of 2022, Motta will have a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, organized by Lucy I. Zimmerman, Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the center.

Taking the form of painting, illustrated ceramic vessels, and mixed media sculpture, Mexican American artist Astrid Terrazas’ (b. 1996) symbolic work re-writes worlds. Her visual language merges dreamscapes, Mexican ancestral folklore, lived experiences, and unearthly transfigurations in her own personal range of recurring motifs that function as artifacts of protection and evoke universal metaphors of transformation. Working in an illustrative, highly detailed style and often adorning her canvases with talismans, charms, and threadwork, Terrazas’ multimedia paintings resemble a visual dream diary full of transient figures, archaic symbols, and illogical narratives. Terrazas describes painting as “a process of finding and burying”, using her coded visual lexicon to deepen the emotional and psychological experience. For Terrazas, painting is akin to incanting: a process of casting spells and weaving new healing narratives to transmute histories. Terrazas (b. 1996) received her BFA in Illustration from Pratt institute in 2018. She has exhibited work at She has exhibited work at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Y2K Group, New York, NY; Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, Italy; Real Pain, New York, NY; Marinaro, New York, NY; Fort Makers, New York, NY; Gern en Regalia, New York, NY; Front Gallery, Houston, TX; and 98 Orchard St, New York, NY; among others. Her work has recently been featured in articles in Art Maze Mag, The Art Newspaper and The Brooklyn Rail and will be included in the forthcoming exhibition 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT opening June 2022. Terrazas’ first solo exhibition in New York will open this spring at P·P·O·W.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Comprised of 6 photographs, Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Ant Series) presents tiny fire ants indiscriminately scuttling across symbols of our most cherished and agonizing social constructs: control, desire, language, spirituality, time/money, and violence. This work, which Wojnarowicz photographed in Mexico, has become iconic not only for its potency in symbolizing the worsening AIDS crisis, but also for its role in the ongoing culture wars. Wojnarowicz has been included in solo and group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Busan, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. His work is in permanent collections of major museums nationally and internationally and his life and work have been the subject of significant scholarly studies. Wojnarowicz has had retrospectives at the galleries of the Illinois State University, 1990, and at the New Museum, curated by Dan Cameron, 1999. A third retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2018. The widely acclaimed exhibition traveled to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in May 2019, and the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City in November 2019. A concurrent exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s films and photographs opened at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2019. Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, a comprehensive feature-length documentary directed by Chris McKim, premiered in November 2020 and was named one of 2021’s best documentaries by Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, and IndieWire, among others. P·P·O·W will present Dear Jean Pierre: The David Wojnarowicz Correspondence with Jean Pierre Delage, 1979-1982 in March 2022.