BFA Visual & Critical Studies presents “Sounding the Ground,” a solo exhibition by artist and writer Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola (BFA VCS 2013). Curated by her long-time collaborator Nick Herman, the exhibition will be on view from Thursday, February 22, through Thursday, March 14, in the Flatiron Project Space at 133 West 21 Street, New York, NY.

Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s creative practice is at its core an art of listening. In diverse bodies of work that include but are not limited to video, drawing and performance, she explores the materiality of language; its sounds, its visual and ritual idioms and the way it shapes memory and travels through time. Employing a semantic rubric that merges familiar technologies of marking the page (ink, lead) alongside the logic and aesthetic of digital editing (cutting, looping), Hinojosa Gaxiola has invented a highly personal vocabulary that can be interpreted on multiple registers. In the gallery, this interest in arrangement and notational gesture informs a range of drawings, text-based and mixed media works that evoke scores, including her new series “Constellations” (2023) consisting of collaged ephemera pinned to boards as well as discrete sound sculptures, “Sonando gravedad (Sounding Gravity)” (2023), in which she constructs a techno-altar by placing stones on synthesizers, thereby activating the space with a perpetual drone.

By locating the roots of language in material, Hinojosa Gaxiola crafts a powerful speculative discourse that engages translation and challenges master tropes of history, ecology and gender. Pushing this inquiry further, her work explores invented languages and how sound can link bodies to their environment. Employing what she calls a “poetics of friction” the artist builds layers of meaning by “playing” different site-specific surfaces and collected objects in a practice that both embraces the archival impulse and challenges its authority. Captured in her video Tepalcates (2021), these sounds blend with the synths and visual scores blurring the line between autonomous works and an ongoing, object-oriented performance. The exhibition “Sonando el Suelo/Sounding the Ground,” is accompanied by an essay written by Herman and available as a free take-away zine in the gallery.

Features