MARFA — It’s not often magic comes to the fore with as great a reveal as the show honoring the plants and animals of the Chihuahuan Desert, which flings aside the curtain and lets the secrets fly. Those who feel the specialness of our desert home and the teachings the plants and animals hold, it touches ancient truths. Those who speak “Desert” will revel in this extraordinary and spare show by Sandra Harper and Tina Rivera on exhibit at Do Right Hall. They may take a bow.
It’s a quiet realm where plants and animals guide the viewer to see their intelligence, patience and feel the presence that sets the viewer’s spirit free to roam other realms where their songs are heard. There are totems by Harper, built of material fibers from yucca and agave plants that have been broken down by weeks of cooking and then forming. Perhaps the slow process adds to the information shared by their presence. It’s a world where the great horned owl presides.
I have been changed by the experience of sharing the space with the totems and the precise hand of Rivera guiding the beaded flowers of our desert plants in bloom. It would be easy to miss the specialness of the blossoms because they require close inspection to understand the artistry of their construction and the joy they exude at fooling us from a distance. These are our local recognizable plants in perpetual bloom — in all their brilliant colors and beauty to remind us they are here with us, even when they are not visible in the landscape.
I’ve often reflected daily, walking my little stretch of Pinto Canyon Road, that it’s my spiritual home, and so it follows these iconographic plants and animals are my church, my guides, my sustenance. The mystical acts of artists bring us across the realms in this gathering as a place of reverence and contemplation. The plants and animals are here watching over us and observing us. The spirit is buoyed out of daily existence and allowed to float.
The owls, pronghorn, hare, fox all formed out of yucca and agave fiber are Harper’s most direct channeling of the ancient wisdom. There are also sculptures of flowers and paintings — they are the chorus as reminders of our shared lived experience with these powerful beings.
Rivera might be a sprite among us making delights out of her facile hand, not just anyone among us could find an old book about bead art and instinctively translate tiny beads into these realistic blossoms.
It’s all a confluence of magic, I tell you. This elevated language astounds me too. Never imagined walking into an exhibition of two well known community members would send me into the stratosphere.
These two artists have answered an ancient calling with this homage to our desert, to our spirits and a full-on gift to all who are lucky enough to still the noise and carry away the enduring energy of the show.
Exhibition up until March 22 at Do Right Hall, 110 W Dallas, Thursday to Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. or by appointment at 917-215-6933.