MARFA — Ballroom Marfa has continued to adjust its exhibitions and operations as COVID remains at some of its highest levels since it arrived in Texas last March. While the local art institution has announced a delay in one upcoming exhibition, its socially-distanced outdoor UnFlagging series presses on, waving new textiles, designs and colors in its courtyard, on display for all travelers along highway 90 in Marfa.
The Blessings of the Mystery is a multidisciplinary exhibition by Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, originally scheduled to run from late January through May of 2021 at Ballroom Marfa. “We have made the difficult decision to postpone the opening of the project until 2022,” the organization announced last week, writing, “The safety of our rural town is our primary concern during this time and we are committed to doing our part to protect Marfa and our neighboring communities from the spread of COVID-19.”
The exhibition will now open at Visual Arts Center, College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2021, and travel as planned to Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, The University of Texas at El Paso in 2022.
Ahead of the 2022 exhibition, residents can visit ballroommarfa.org to hear Caycedo and de Rozas discuss The Blessings of the Mystery on the Transmissions audio series where former Marfa resident Diana Nguyen interviews the artistic duo.
On Friday, Ballroom raised its final flag installation in the UnFlagging series, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s “all things are organized as uncertainty,” (2021). One side’s words and phrases read “all things are organized,” “as strange flutters of uncertainty,” “time is structured thick” each encircled in white spheres.
The reverse side of the flag offers a different experience, reading, “strange flutters,” “behind this cosmic verse.” These words and spheres float atop graphics reminiscent of geological or cosmic renderings. Black and white strokes gesture towards movement and gather form with layers of pink and fuchsia circular patterns. These changing arrangements allow us to read the flag in different ways and reveal new meanings from what is visible and what is hidden, presenting a poetic gesture in motion.
As a self-described learner, Rasheed’s practice uses text and form to reveal a cosmology in constant flux. Her work uses the generative qualities of incompleteness and poetic play to help the viewer form synapses and uncover new meanings. “With all things are organized as uncertainty,” the statements in motion provoke the reader to pause and reflect on what it means to read effectively, thoroughly, closely.
The artist explained, “If the words never settle and we are consistently engaged in acts of [un]learning, than that means I must stay attuned to generative and interdependent Black storytelling methodologies that nurture us in ways of reading, writing, speaking, listening, archiving, and knowing that challenge finality, enclosure, fixed meaning, and the death of capture.”