July 22 – August 5, 2024
“A dance” a response to New growth by Samara Elán
By Mary L. Coyne
“I see dance in everything and everything as dance–you sitting reading, birds migrating, construction outside–and I think about how the dances I make are in conversation with these already existing dances in the world. It’s this conversation between the performance and the rest of the world”
–Emily Johnson
Two years ago, upon returning from a trip via Iceland, a dear friend gave me a copper necklace – three strands of copper entwined into a braid. The vikings, she told me, imbued social meanings significance into braids, marital status, clan, origin. For us, it was a symbol of friendship, a living interconnectedness.
Last year a friend showed me a small locket of her now-deceased mother’s hair. It would eventually become an artwork–how was yet to be determined. Between relic and inheritance, the vulnerable remnant of inherited DNA appeared, in that moment like a lichen on an arctic stone, persistently present across generations, despite the odds.
This summer I spent time with a drawing, only a few inches in size, centered on a piece of yellowed, aged paper. Closely cropped on a pair of hands, plaiting another’s hair, the simple act of care between the artist’s mother and his sister is portrayed while veiling their likenesses. The simple moment shared exists beyond time and place.
In July Samara Elán shared a memory. Her mother, braiding her sister’s hair, while having a conversation, and sharing life advice. The bystander in this familia scene, Samara recalled acknowledging the wisdom passed in this exchange. The hair, while inevitably loosened from that day’s hairstyle, was, for a time, a visible product of a vulnerable moment. “Hair,” she stated, “is a container of secrets.”
This summer Samara Elán has installed potted tradescantia zebrina, rosemary, and marigold plants on a table in Dunning, each pot gently held within tightly wrapped synthetic braided black hair. In addition to warding off infection, Rosemary is effective in supporting hair growth and health–the braids’s support of the life within it holds a symbiotic return. Marigold, considered protective for its medicinal properties, holds spiritual significance across cultures, for its prophetic and protective qualities. Tradescantia pallida, sometimes called “the wandering Jew,” held a more personal connection–Elán recalls it was her grandmother’s favorite plant.
Since 2019, Elán has incorporated braided hair into her work, initially as adornment, and increasingly as the fabric of a narrative weaving practice. Her textile works hold experiences, poems, and stories, at times partially revealed through embroidered text, or held within the very fiber and material of their construction. Incorporating fabrics dyed with natural materials often grown and developed by the artist, or hand-me-down garments inherited from the women in her family, Elán’s works draw from and feed into a simple human ecology. Each work results from a life of care–of and in relation to others, of flora and fauna, of the symbiosis of nature. Elán’ works place these relationships at their heart, taking the form of clothing, or prop, exist somewhere between text, object, and costume – often worn by the artist within particular contexts, times, places.
Within the context of Elán’s work, performance exists not as an action for an audience within a particular time but rather material evidence of an experience that remains private. Among the works in Elán’s studio are a pair of slippers, constructed of three layers of cotton, and partially embroidered with a poem fragment:
“cumulus container/ condensing into/ the ki tchen”
Worn by the artist during three different private situations during daily life, the slippers have since been retired, bearing the residue of apartment floors, the text imprinted into their soles, personal memories made physical. The slippers exist as performance objects, as are much of Elán’s practice does. Artworks themselves that refer back to a time, a physical memory of life that we may or may not have access to.
In the spring of this year I spent a few hours at the Museum of Modern Art The occasion: Joan Jonas’s long-awaited career retrospective. Built upon archives of pamphlets and photographs, costumes and props, film and video documentation, as well as re-created installation were brought together to narrate Jonas’s expansive practice across what I like to describe as living and unfolded theater. Personal experiences become symbols, become archetypes, become crafted objects emerging from worked and reworked elements of previous artworks. Never fully laid out in a single narrative, we can engage with Jonas’s bodies of work through an acknowledgement of her own, ongoing, creative, life.
Performance is simply another language for thinking about the ways in which we live within our bodies, bodies that hold, are held, gradually accumulating the residue of experiences. While performance is generally considered to rely on the trappings of time, and the voyeuristic role of live or delayed audience, This summer I thought a lot about how our bodies brush up against things, how we make decisions about how and where we move, and why. A small part of the time, we intentionally hold onto things, unite ingredients in a blender, hair strands in a braid, seeds in a pot, clothes on a hanger, a re-contextualization of something as an act of gentle care and transformation. Elán’s enfolding of the terra cotta pots goes beyond decoration, it’s an enfolding, the care of braiding her own, or another’s hair is transmuted onto the care she expends on the plants themselves, which is in turn, potentially transmuted outwards through the inherent properties of the plants themselves.
In August three plants flourished in terra cotta pots, embraced and held by braids of black hair to the melody of cicada songs. The plants’s upward movement, imperceivable to human consciousness, would over time be evident but the hours of observed stillness where, for those gathered, a key aspect of a dance, germinated from ancestral and recent pasts, and continuing to grow, like our hair outwards and upwards.