“Savage Palms, Worn Stones, Moonshine Vision,” at Minneapolis’s Midway Contemporary Art through February 15, is as transcendent and disparate as its title. Julia Rometti and Victor Costales’s collaborative artworks have a mystical quality countered only by their aseptic display. The main gallery is dominated by Worn Contingencies and their shadows (on a Riffian Beach), 2013, 26 photocollages of rounded stones painted with slip, an off-white sandy paint, that appear like phases of the moon. As a companion piece, the artists invited poet Quinn Latimer to write a stone-shaped poem alliterating its many uses, from weapon to grave marker to sacred object. Opposite the photographs stands Plantas Populares–Movimento: Agitato, 2013, a black-and-white 16 mm film of palms waving wildly in a tropical breeze. The clanking projector and flickering images of the windswept plants sharply contrasts with the quietude of the stones. Ediciones del Exotismo Ordinario Internacional Neotropical(Editions of the International Exoticism Neotropical), 2011, mediates between the two works. This ongoing series of photocopied collages on newsprint includes bits of text covering an array of topics from botany to politics. All are instructions in some form: how to propagate tropical plants, how to lead a revolution. The faded inks and fragile paper of this series of formally displayed pamphlets remain neatly preserved in a vitrine.
In the library adjacent to the main gallery, two slide projectors cast images of a stone onto translucent paper; the images fade into one another, making the rocks appear airy and light. On a shelf next to this work, several black-and-white reproductions of a portrait of Antonin Artaud are decorated with large metal paper clips. A.A. Tropicalizado, or the Three Happiest Days of his Life, 2012, references Artaud’s trip to a remote area of Mexico in search of enlightenment through the use of mind-altering substances. Both pieces maintain the archival aesthetic that predominates throughout the show.
Despite the appearance of order, links between bodies of works are tenuous and leave room for association. The strongest pieces offer a concise pairing of a natural object and a specific medium, suggesting an uncanny synchrony between the two, an inherent quality that is shared, like the plants in the breeze and the film’s flickering, or the plainness of the round stones and the objectivity of the photograph.
Click on the slideshow to see images from “Savage Palms, Worn Stones, Moonshine Vision.”
Julia Rometti and Victor Costales,Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, through February 15.
A version of this article will appear in the May 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
