The great and honorable unraveling

What connects us and what chains us in "BCA 27th Drawing Show: Yušká: Uncoil”

Constanza Alarcón Tennen, “Tu, yo, y todo el viento entremedio II (mudras de nazca).” 2023. Polytonal whistle for two mouths in stoneware, rope. 40 cm x 20 cm plus rope height. Photo by Melissa Blackall, courtesy Boston Center for the Arts.

Hands of brown clay bound together with a blue rope hang from the ceiling of the Mills Gallery in the “Boston Center for the Arts 27^th Drawing Show: Yušká: Uncoil.” And, oh yes – those hands? They’re polytonal whistles.

It’s Constanza Alarcón Tennen’s brilliant “Tu, yo, y todo el viento entremedio II (mudras de nazca)” (“Me, you, and all the wind in between [Nazca’s mudras]”). Constanza and the show’s juror and curator, Erin Genia, played the whistles in a May 30 performance (here’s another performance at a different venue last year).

Rope is binding; breath is freeing. The bound hands hold a mudra, a yogic gesture made to stimulate the flow of prana, or life force. This artwork at once expresses binding and liberation; it is the music that people can make when joined together if they allow or find space enough between them.

Fear is a default. Like art, love and respect are intentional practices.

“Yušká: Uncoil” takes on the systemic webs that hold society in place, often in viciously destructive ways. Erin, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota multidisciplinary artist, organizer, and educator, has put together a tapestry of an exhibition that ties personal to political, the constriction of binding to the wild wonder of liberation.

According to the exhibition material, Yušká is a word in the Dakhota language that means “untie, release, uncoil, loosen, set free.”

That process involves releasing and honoring what came before – confinement, damage, the trauma of ancestors. It means recognizing the tangles and chains of limiting orthodoxies like racism, colonialism, and capitalism. Some of the works read like reliquaries or altars, some like portals into a transcendence that’s less about building a new and better world than it is about returning to the ancient, earth-based world of Indigenous cosmology: respect for all living things.