Clarissa Tossin’s New Vs Old

 Clarissa Tossin’s New Vs Old

by Joseph Poehlman

Clarissa Tossin’s work comments on the appropriation of Mayan design and culture. In The Mayan (2017), a series of works explores the Mayan Revival in architecture with a critical eye. The video Ch'u Mayaa (2017), was made to reference and critique Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House. As the artist’s website describes it, the work shows a  series of moving pictures filled with a vocabulary of movements and gestures. It was commissioned by the city of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for the exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles/Latin America. The Architecture of the house was heavily inspired by Mayan design. Crystal Sepúlveda, who is also the choreographer, replicates “postures found in ancient Mayan pottery and murals.” On the walls hang latex castings of the ornaments in the Mayan Theater in LA.

 

Installation View: “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern

 Architecture, New Art” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,

 July 13-September 30, 2018)

The Mayan Theater has symbols similar to the ones on classical Mayan temples. The artist added  casts of her hands, arms, and feet which hang on the wall coming out of the white void of the wall. The pose on the hands and feet refer to classical Mayan dances, as if a dancer were frozen in time. The red of these body parts reappears in another work by the artist in the form of Pre-Columbian flutes. 

 

21st Century Wisdom: Healing Frank Lloyd Wright's

 textile block houses, 2019

These flutes were 3-D printed with clay, then dipped into colored clay to make it look like terracotta. The replicas were then used to make contemporary music. 

HD single-channel digital video, color, sound, 17:56 min