The great and honorable unraveling
What connects us and what chains us in "BCA 27th Drawing Show: Yušká: Uncoil”
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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 27th 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.”