Measuring The Weight Of A Life

“If we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.”
- James Baldwin

What is a map? Better yet, what are the politics and identities that go into cartographic praxis? Does a map convey a singular truth? No. Instead, a map presents us with layers of constantly shifting truths and perspectives compressed into a single piece of information. This synthesized information is often reflective of a singular and subjective perspective; a perspective that has been colored by monolithic historical perspectives.

People are similar to maps in this way: politicized and composed of many morphing identities and truths. People, particularly people of the Global majority, are often seen through a lens of many ideas that have been pressure-condensed into hegemonic perspectives.

Project for Empty Space Artist in Resident Nadia Liz Estela addresses and unpacks the complexity of these layerings in her solo exhibition heavy is the root of the dawn. A Dominican American, Estela scales from the micro of her own personal experience to the macro of the larger phenomenon of social constructionism, identity, labor, and the ‘immigrant,’ experience.

The entry point for the exhibition is a series of small drawings of (un)rooted plants and weapons gleaned from western art historical books. These works are our first visual inkling of the artist’s deep connection to not only homeland but to a critical lens of what identity means within a particular multifaceted and intersectional framework. All of the plants that are depicted are rhizomes. They can be consumed but also are self-sufficient. They are able to multiply in parallel directions, outside of themselves. These drawings exist alongside ancient weapons, which outside of their historical and ritual contexts are juxtaposed with forms of quantification, nature, beading, and decommissioned economic texts. These works function as a critique on the devaluation of nature and historical accountability, a theme that finds its way subtly into the rest of the exhibition.

From the twelve intimate drawings, the larger body of work unfolds. The pieces created during Estela’s time at PES include massive layered panels and durational performances, sewn together through the presence of scraps of textile. Estela’s mother worked for years as a seamstress. As an acknowledgment of that labor, bits of cloth have since made their way into the artist’s formal practice as she both physically and conceptually creates connections with the material. In her durational performance, which happens at dawn every Friday during the duration of the exhibition, Estela lives this labor and complexity by weaving an infinite tapestry of discarded shirts trails, and cuffs. The performance is dually meditative and laborious. She says of the piece, “the laborious process that a seamstress endures in creating garments is akin to the same type of constructive and arduous process that we go through to weave ourselves together as a whole of many parts.”

Fabric is an important element in both the performance and the static works. Not only do they pull from her personal history, but manifest as a conceptual critique on social constructs like gender. Her process involves ripping discarded men’s shirts into strips and then plaiting them like hair, as a way to both reclaim and disfigure. It is a dually violent and cathartic endeavor. These braids become ropes that are amassed and become a large mound, unmovable, untameable.

This is seen in large panels in the gallery, a myriad of lush fabrics and textures traverse the flat planes, enhancing the segregation of colors from one another. Braided shirts vomit out of the azure-indigo expanse. The crimson panel features a visceral spillage of blood-red velvet dipped in wax; a vibrant party-mesh blooms from the violet panel.

They are veritable cartographies, covered in layers of wax and other detritus of a similar palate. In some paintings, small grotesqueries like beetles and cicadas are ensconced forever in a wax coffin. Estela uses wax as a means to represent the body. Like flesh sloughed off bones, it oozes, folds, thickens, before rigor sets in and it solidifies.

Other found bits appear in the panels, such as wire fencing on the lush grass-green work. Fencing is meant to keep things out or parted. They are welded, manipulated and molded, to also resemble fabric. To also be hard but soft-like wax. Like skin.

This venture into topographic construction leads the work into the exploration of more macro, or universal, ideas around identity, colonialism, labor, and belonging. The massive physical centerpiece of the exhibition is a large-scale embroidery of a map of Newark, the city where Estela grew up. This map, gleaned from the Newark Historical Archives, depicts the city circa 1776, as it looked ‘during the revolution.’ This piece of local history introduces a series of questions based on what is included, or, perhaps more importantly, what is left out. By magnifying the map (originally scaled at 11 x 13 inches) nearly 100 fold, Estela amplifies the omissions and politicization of identity through mapping. Who or what is left out? What are the implications of this omission from a legacy standpoint? Where is the acknowledgment of labor, particularly the labor of enslaved peoples and the presence of indigenous peoples?

How does a simple historical document shape perceptions of history, of ourselves? Like all exhibitions rooted in socio-historical consideration, Nadia Estela’s work presents many questions without many answers. It pushes you to consider the implications of flattened identities and to explode them into oblivion through meditative contemplation. heavy is the root of the dawn is on view at Project for Empty Space from October 2nd, 2021, through December 20th, 2021.

- Text by PES Co-Director Jasmine Wahi, 2021