THEATER GALLERY

Bel Falleiros: Navel-Knot // Root-Rise

Curated by Jess Wilcox and organized in partnership with River Valley Arts Collective

9 Mar. – 5 May 2024

River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to present Bel Falleiros: Navel-Knot // Root-Rise, organized in partnership with KinoSaito Art Center. The exhibition embraces the symbolic potential of the artist’s engagement with Earth-centered elements: fired terra cotta, plant and earth pigments, and sound that Falleiros incorporates into a series of works that celebrate the majesty and complexity of landforms and forests, and the continuity of water and life flowing through them.

The show’s anchor work titled Vermelho como Brasil [As Red as Brazil] explores the history, vibrancy, and endangerment of the artist's place of birth and the slow growing native trees that gave the colonial state its name. Falleiros pays homage to these trees with a hanging painting installation of semi-circular form that approximates the diameter of a recently discovered six hundred year-old Brazilwood tree. The painting’s vermillion pigment is made from the sawdust byproduct of Brazilwood violin bows, demonstrating the artist’s ethical sourcing and her concern for this limited earth resource.

Rounded forms also appear in Falleiros’ earth Navels series that explore sacred geologic and human made landforms that range from the geometries of indigenous architecture to volcanoes and sink-hole caves known as cenotes. The Earth’s Navel, the supposed center of the world, manifests as a recurring element in both terracotta (fired earth) and painting (water-based earth pigment) works and serves as a reminder of art’s enmeshment in ecological systems and sacred places.

Falleiros’ Ripple series highlights the movement of water through atmosphere and matter, uniting land, plants, humans and the Earth in the interconnected ecological system of life. The sound work To Ripple with Water imbues the exhibition space with a restorative mood and vocals that parallel the Earth’s own reparative forces.

Finding significance in both the material and metaphorical ripple effects in the world, several of the artist’s ceramic sculptures adopt the form of concentric circles reminiscent of the shapes caused by a drop on still water. The video work titled Ripple Stories (Haverstraw) explores the unifying nature of water and its relationship to clay by capturing Falleiros performing a symbolic act on the shore of Haverstraw, New York. Located just across the Hudson River and south of KinoSaito, the town, once a capital of U.S. brickmaking in the 19th Century, was devastated by a landslide due to the brick industry’s over extraction of clay from the land. In a memorializing gesture, Falleiros acknowledges this past by arranging eroded abandoned bricks in a series of concentric circles, allowing the estuary tide to obscure her small landmark.

Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist whose practice focuses on place and belonging. Starting in her hometown of São Paulo, she has worked to understand how contemporary constructed landscapes (mis)represent the diverse layers of presence that constitute a place and how this affects its inhabitants. Walking is core to Falleiros’ practice and played a significant role in her first solo exhibition at CAIXA Cultural São Paulo in 2014. Since arriving in the United States, she has produced public land artworks at Pecos National Park, New Mexico (2016); at Burnside Farm, Detroit, IL (2017); in collaboration with Tewa Women United as part of the Santa Fe Art Institute’s Equal Justice Residency (2018); and as part of the MONUMENTS NOW’ show at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY (2020). Recently, Falleiros was featured in Under the ashes, ember at MAM, São Paulo (2022), the New York Latin American Art Triennial Abya Yala: Structural Origins (2022), and a solo exhibition Floresta de Pulsares (Forest of Pulses) at Wave Hill, in Bronx, New York (2023).

River Valley Arts Collective is a Hudson Valley-based, W.A.G.E. certified organization committed to fostering an inclusive creative community that is responsive and attuned to the ecology of our region. Through partnerships with neighboring arts organizations, foundations, studios, and farms, we curate exhibitions, commission new work, organize outdoor installations, give artists both material and monetary grants, coordinate residencies, host workshops, and spark vital discussions. As a nexus for regional artists and artisans to connect and collaborate with each other as well as with the broader community, we create a generative space for experimentation and shared learning. Our efforts foster the production of work that is as aesthetically and conceptually groundbreaking as it is environmentally aware.