If “the medium is the message,” as philosopher Marshall McLuhan once said, then the message of Athena LaTocha’s art is death. The ten mixed-media abstractions on display in the artist’s exhibition here were made of dirt – excavated from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery – as well as demolition site debris, pulverized building materials and glass microbeads used in road paint, which she obtained from the New York State Department of Transportation. LaTocha’s framed compositions distill mortality into a concentrate, undiluted by any intimation of life – unless they feature the type of glass bead known as a “seed bead”, perhaps suggesting that the recovery of a wasteland for the sake of one’s creative endeavors makes it a fertile ingredient. That his land comes from a cemetery indicates it, because Vert-Bois is not necessarily a wasteland and morbid place, given all the flora and fauna that inhabit it. Was the inseparability of life and death the implicit theme of LaTocha’s exhibition? His version of Gotham isn’t exactly “Fun City,” as former mayor John Lindsay described New York City in 1966. Rather, it’s a picker’s paradise.
The Brooklyn-based Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe artist grew up in Alaska. Early on, she became aware of the devastating effects of oil and gas drilling on the “rugged monumentality” of her home state, as she explains on her website. Without a doubt, his works are the memento mori. In a sense, LaTocha is reclaiming what was taken from Native Americans by the United States government. Indeed, she transforms poison into gold: even if her art comes from exploitation and darkness, she manages to imbue it with great light. Take Untitled #32022, a horizontal band of variegated whites, browns, blacks and musty reds that evokes a sublime landscape on the edge of ruin, or Untitled #4 of the same year, a wonderful abstraction that evokes the paintings of JMW Turner with its twilight palette and stormy textures. LaTocha’s “images”, if that’s how you choose to characterize them, are lined with dark metal frames. Such a presentation gives the work a resolutely funereal character, as if each piece were lovingly displayed in its heavy, raw steel sarcophagus.
LaTocha is a protest artist, and her work has an important place in the history of feminist and Native American activist art. His images also work like Earthworks, in a way, but not as self-enlarging as Robert Smithson’s. spiral jetty1970, or as cumbersome as Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Hall, 1977. Instead, LaTocha invites the viewer into an intimate relationship with our declining planet and much of the toxic detritus that has shaped it. As Percy Bysshe Shelley does in his 1818 poem “Ozymandias”, the artist expresses the despair that accompanies death, rather than denying it with delusions of grandeur. “Look at my works, you mighty ones, and despair!” writes Shelley. “There is nothing left. Around the decay / Of this colossal wreck, boundless and bare / Lonely flat sands stretch far away. The pieces in this exhibit were ruthlessly physical, subtly conceptual, and deeply emotional. Although modest in scale and materials, each work was gargantuan in scope and spirit.
