Chelsea Culprit Asherah Grove

Created in Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Punto Pajaros over the past two years, the works presented in Asherah Grove take inspiration from objects that belong to the archeological records of the Levant, the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Old Europe and the late Stone Age. If it is the historian and classicist’s task to wring meaning from these artifacts, Chelsea Culprit’s practice instead saturates them with new uses through a nimble play of speculative imagination. The works arrive by synergy of process driven material exploration, historical research, cultivated states of trance and meditation, and intuitive site-specific response.

The works selected for this exhibition contain imagery related to the stories and symbols pertaining to women and the ‘pagan’ religions that predate and lead into the embattled formation of the monothiestic patriarchal religions of the Levant and Mediterranean, religions that have shape-shifted over millennia into the Christian Fundamentalism that increasingly influences the political climate of the United States. Their shared patterns of erasure of women’s history is the ground on which these excavated figures stand on.

The serpent recurs throughout as a case study of this displacement. Long before its appearance in Genesis as a figure of temptation and downfall, the serpent moved through the region’s religious life as something sacred. It was the emblem of Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess called “lady of the serpent” whose sacred groves once stood beside the altars of Yahweh before reformers tore them down. Over a thousand years earlier, it coiled through Sumerian religion as Ningishzida, “Lord of the Good Tree,” a deity composed of a serpent and a tree, bound together as a single figure that symbolized vegetation, immortality and the underworld. The paintings and sculptures in this exhibition treat these symbols (goddess, grove, serpent, tree) not as archetypes to be decoded by psychoanalysis, but as evidence: traces of a history that was not lost so much as it was overwritten by the religions that succeeded them. The shuffling of symbols from different eras is historical before it is psychological: it is a reorganization not of the collective unconscious but of the collective record.

Conceptually, the exhibition unearths the deeper, more complicated histories of symbols we assume we already know. The work does not attempt to revive or correct these histories. Instead, it treats the unknown as a site through which one can gleefully take the helm: a responsibility to continue an old tradition of reworking these symbols’ uses and meanings, and to claim, in the present tense, significance for stories that have already been reshaped many times over. Ancient art arrives to us often in the mystery of lost context. We know that we do not know its original purpose, its rituals, its cosmology. For Culprit, this gap is an opening. Allowing for a way of looking and feeling that engages what the object itself can still communicate of whatever is imbued in it, not solely on more scholarly suppositions.

Made on rainy rooftops in Guadalajara and along sandy tracks of Oaxacan beaches, surfaces of these works are authored by the elements as much as the artist’s hand: rain, sun, sand, salt, heat, the speed at which something dries, the loss of mark and pigment when it is wetted again. At times the canvas is worked directly; at times it is left to circumstance, walked upon, weathered, manipulated by the outdoors. Erasure is visible. It is from these surfaces, eroded by time and the elements and roughed by the artist, that  images are carved out, excavated from a gestural ground. Materials are not precious, and marks are made for themselves without an image in mind. Only after this physical process, through looking, does an image reveal itself and initiate a visual dérive into the subconscious. For any image to emerge is a dice-roll and a trust-fall. Between automatic trance and ancestral recall, Culprit sheds the burden of semiotic taxonomy into looser relations.

A different trust-fall occurs in the sculptural works, made collaboratively with the artisans at Ceramica Suro in response to their machines, materials, and processes. Initiated with the simple inquiry: what does a body look like when it is made of domestic tablewares and utilitarian vessels? Whose body is it? If the bodies are made of these utilitarian goods, perhaps they are the bodies of people responsible for the rituals of domestic labor. Small gouache paintings map what form and posture the bodies might take. The artist and artisans together then determine which vessels and vases can construct which parts of the body. In their final forms, just as the vessels that construct them have shed their utility, the ‘Diosa Domestica Holy Hags’ celebrate a liberation of the bodies they represent from the labor they are bound to. Giving so much agency in the works by the hands of others allows a different play with chance than the paintings, but one that continues an inquiry about the boundaries between the self, others, and the environment; suggesting those boundaries might be more porous than they appear.

The artist is especially thankful to the generous support provided by Ceramica Suro, Casa Mucha, and Casa Wabi, without whom this exhibition would not be possible.