Tucson, AZ -- CAConrad: 500 Places at Once: September 13, 2024 - February 16, 2025 - East Wing
500 Places at Once is an exhibition of work by the poet CAConrad that features new sculptural poems commissioned by MOCA and a reading room with the full series of publications from fivehundred places, a small press established by the artist Jason Dodge.
The exhibition features nine poems as art objects by Conrad, selected from the poet’s newest publication Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. The pieces in MOCA’s installation were realized through a (soma)tic ritual practice, which involved writing with animals thriving in the anthropocene like crows and rats. In the gallery, the poems jump off the page and stand vertically at around five feet tall, prompting a physical encounter with the creature-like nature of the text. Together, they suggest a gathering of poem-bodies or a small forest of poems and emphasize Conrad’s attention to the porous and manifold relationships between language and the body, internal landscapes and the environment.
The exhibition also contains a reading room with publications from 500hundred places, a small press founded in 2012 by artist Jason Dodge, a close collaborator and friend of Conrad’s. Visitors are invited to peruse the full collection of the press, which runs a single printing of 500 copies of books by poets such as Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Dorothea Laksy, and more. The reading room at MOCA will feature new books by Bernadette Mayer, Bianca Stone, and Conrad. Created during the lead up to this exhibition, Conrad’s new collection of poems titled First Light, is co-published by Five Hundred Places, MOCA, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Exhibition programming is co-presented with the University of Arizona Poetry Center. A free poetry reading will take place at MOCA Thursday, September 19th at 6pm. Conrad will also lead public workshops that focus on poetry, somatic practices, dates to be announced.
500 Places at Once is organized by Laura Copelin, Deputy Director & Lead Curator with Alexis Wilkinson, Curator.
Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain: September 13, 2024 - February 16, 2025 - East Wing
Graves for the Rain is the first solo museum exhibition by artist and musician Karima Walker who works with sound, sculpture, and durational performance to consider ecological practices and grief in response to the hydrological death of the Santa Cruz River. Through recurring performances, Walker builds up an earthen sculpture and an immersive audio piece, accumulating layers of river material and sound over the course of the exhibition. Informed by the history of human intervention to the river and her ongoing sonic engagement with the landscape, Walker seeks to understand the ways we relate to the land. Attuning to the river through listening and movement, she states, “I’m holding the microphone up to the river’s mouth, circling and circling, grieving in the absence of the body. Can I hear what the river is saying?”
Walker situates her body in relation to the water body through recurring performances that introduce fluvial soil—referring broadly to soil that has been moved by water within a river or channel—collected from the Santa Cruz’s riverbed into the museum’s gallery. The performances are conceived as grief rituals where Walker engages the river’s material to enact a slow burial and an ongoing practice of tending. The artist walks in a circular path in the direction of the river’s flow while releasing the fluvial soil onto the floor, materially marking her movements. With each repeated performance the earthen sculpture will grow, becoming a temporary landscape shaped by the gallery’s architecture and Walker’s looping circuits.
Audio documentation of Walker’s path-making movements—the sound of earth falling and her footprints as they are laid, buried, and re-laid—plays continuously through speakers that surround the sculpture, panning in a circular direction that echoes Walker’s path in her absence. Through repetitions, loops, and cycles, Walker generates a site that is always in flux, alternating between states of process, accumulation, and rest.
Process-performances by the artist will take place in the gallery throughout the exhibition’s duration beginning at the opening reception on Friday, September 13 at 7pm; and on Sundays at 2pm, on November 3, December 8, January 12, and February 2.
Graves for the Rain is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Curator.
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