Graciela Sacco. Enfrentados (serie Tensión Admisible), 2011; photographic inlay on wood, installed on wall. Courtesy of Diana Lowenstein Gallery and Artist.

The work of the six Latin American and Latino artists in Hidden Histories personalizes the staggering statistics of displaced, marginalized, and murdered individuals, both historically and presently. Using commonplace materials, these artists attempt to give voice to those who have been silenced or forgotten. At the front of the gallery, a broken wooden barricade overlaid with an image of Argentinian protesters confronting military police juts outs from the wall. Graciela Sacco’s Enfrentados (serie Tensión Admisible) [Confronted (Admissible Tension Series)] has a fractured barrier and an air of resistance; it stands as the lone positive response to the struggle against injustice.

Teresa Margolles. La Búsqueda (The Search), 2014; multimedia installation with sound; 112.5 x 71 ¼ x 47 ¼ in., 112.5 x 38 x 47 ¼ in., and 112.5 x 52 x 47 ¼ in. Photo: Thomas Strub.

In Untitled (Mobius), artist Luis González Palma fabricated a roll of felt resembling a blanket or rug that reveals the face of a young woman obscured by red threads. The woman is from one of Guatemala’s vulnerable indigenous communities. Lacking basic human rights, these communities have been held back and suppressed. The contradiction of revealing and obscuring, along with the title’s reference to a Möbius strip, alludes to the past and present marginalization of these people.

Doris Salcedo. Untitled, 1995; wood, concrete, steel, glass, and cloth; 110 × 47 × 14 ½ in. Photo: Ken Howie.

The Colombian civil war and ensuing unrest and violence motivated Doris Salcedo to create works wrought with emotional and psychological tensions. Her untitled piece from 1995 is one of a large group of sculptures combining domestic wooden furniture with cement. An armoire has been filled with cement and rendered dysfunctional; the furniture and its associations with domesticity and the body become evocative of death and entombment.

Vincent Valdez. The Strangest Fruit, 2014; pencil on paper; 40 x 26 in.

In contrast to Salcedo’s more abstract references, there are two figurative drawings by Vincent Valdez from his The Strangest Fruit series. Inspired by the history of lynched Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the late 1800s well into the 1930s, the title is borrowed from Abel Meripool’s poem “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday’s 1930s recording of the same name. The haunting lyrics use the metaphor of “strange fruit” to characterize victims hanged from trees. Valdez individualizes the erased histories of Latinos by drawing his friends in the positions of the dead. Depicted in modern clothing, the young men in these drawings poetically reference the current state of racial discrimination toward Latinos in the United States.

Annie Lopez. Sighting Mexicans in Phoenix, 2012; cyanotype on paper; 26 ½ x 17 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Similarly, Phoenix-based artist Annie Lopez is a fourth-generation Mexican American who incorporates her personal history into works that echo the sentiments of discrimination that underpin the exhibition. Sighting Mexicans in Phoenix (2012) is a photograph of her mother and aunt walking happily down the street in the 1950s, printed with gun sights over their bodies in reference to current-day racial profiling. Naturalized Citizens (2013) uses her family’s naturalization papers to create a cyanotype paper dress that alludes to the need to display one’s citizenship when it is so often called into question just by outward appearance.

While the works in Hidden Histories bravely assert a multitude of issues in Latin America and the U.S., the question lingers as to why the exhibition is sequestered in a small gallery wrapped around the freight elevator. The Phoenix Art Museum’s concurrent exhibition features works by such heavy-hitting Latino artists as Alfredo Jaar, Vik Muniz, José Bedia Valdés, Félix González-Torres, and Luis Molina-Pantin, among others. It would have been refreshing to see the Hidden Histories works, more than half of which are by women, expanded in a larger space to allow the sound of those voices to go from a whisper to a shout.

Hidden Histories in Latin American Art is on view at the Phoenix Art Museum through August 23, 2015.

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Carrie Marill. Dishberg, 2014; acrylic and graphite on linen; 44 x 58 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale. Photo: Michael Lundgren.

Dishberg (2014), for example, is a formally beautiful array of pattern and color. The title alludes to that mountainous pile of dirty dishes that accumulates daily, and here the iceberg shape is composed of alternating blue and white stripes that rest atop a pink-bricked surface with a neutral, gray-bricked wall in the background. This is the kind of mess one could look at for a very long time. In a home with babies, the only things that amass faster than dishes are diapers and laundry; Pile (2014) could be either or neither of these. Here the pink bricks seem to reference building blocks, the sort that children play with as they help create the structure on which the paint rests. This pile is ambiguous—is it accumulating or deteriorating?

Carrie Marill. Pile, 2014; acrylic and graphite on linen; 44 x 38 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale. Photo: Michael Lundgren.

A more introspective work, Calder Crowd (2014) consists of three nesting figures with their backs to the viewer, engaged in some unseen activity with an audience of igloo-like masses. Silhouettes of Calder mobiles punctuate the composition and lend a sense of serenity to an otherwise turbulent scene. The large canvas (38 x 44 inches) is nearly all gray, blue, and taupe, while the heads of the three female figures are made of frenetic bands of multicolored hair. Borrowing a technique seen in Futurist painter Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), Marill represents movement through repetition of the women’s heads.

Carrie Marill. Calder Crowd, 2014; acrylic and graphite on linen; 38 x 44 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale. Photo: Michael Lundgren.

Marill’s previous works have explored patterning—as in Native American weavings, Persian miniatures, Japanese scrolls, and American quilts—and often appropriated aspects from the art-historical canon. Elements typical of artists such as Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Agnes Martin, and Philip Guston surface in unexpected places in Marill’s work. More than half of the canvases are small (14-by-11-inch) still lifes and studies of pattern and color that resurface in the larger canvases. The subjects are hands, eyes, patterned vessels, cigarette butts, and a curiously familiar lightbulb. When I spoke with the artist, she mentioned the influence of Philip Guston and his paintings of lightbulbs; the subject of Marill’s Closet (2014) is a lone, fluorescent spiral lightbulb hanging in front of the corner of a pink-bricked wall. Similar to Guston’s paintings, it evokes a sense of isolation and desperation.

Carrie Marill. Closet, 2014; acrylic on linen; 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale. Photo: Michael Lundgren.

Another small work, Mundane (2014), highlights the medium of paint itself in a kaleidoscope of acrylic colors on the artist’s signature raw-linen canvas. An unstable pile of oozing, cracked paint reveals the particular qualities of the paint that is used to give furniture a distressed look. When a thick coat is applied, it cracks and wrinkles, in this case revealing vulnerability. Most of the works on display hold a duality of strength and weakness. They pile up paint or blocks that fall down or go nowhere. Here, domesticity and motherhood are approached as a series of Sisyphean tasks.

Carrie Marill. Mundane, 2014; acrylic on linen; 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale. Photo: Michael Lundgren.

Women have fought long and hard (and continue to fight) to be considered equals to men in the art world. In the 19th century, when a few talented artists broke through the patriarchal art world, they painted what they knew and what they had access to: the interior of houses and children. Since then, women have stayed far away from a subject matter that would label them as anything less than professional in their field. The works of Carrie Marill are by no means representations of the traditional mother and child, but the title of the show and the individual works relate to the complicated realm of motherhood and artistic production. Although the artist sees this as a sloppy, disordered place, her works read as beautiful ruminations on the interior, domestic sphere.

Carrie Marill:
 Domesticated is on view at Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, through May 17, 2014.

Leslie Shows. Face B, 2012; ink, acrylic, mylar, plexiglass, crushed glass, and engraving on aluminum; 60 X 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA. © Leslie Shows.

A survey of Shows’ recent works is currently on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art—the artist’s first museum solo exhibition—and it provides a snapshot of Shows’ nascent oeuvre. A drawing titled Black Iceberg (2008) greets visitors with the representation of a rare dark-colored iceberg—a nod to the artist’s Alaskan roots and a childhood spent on the glacial tundra. The black iceberg rests somewhat uneasily on the top third of the white paper; the small triangular shape is reflected in water, all of which is rendered in warm, black ink. The color of the iceberg, along with the great expanse of empty space underneath it, creates a foreboding presence.

Installation view of
Leslie Shows: Surfacing at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ. Photo: Dana Buhl.

Following is an installation of the Pyrite series (2012), a more intimate study of geological materials. Complexity in Shows’ work becomes palpable as the viewer reads the list of materials: acrylic, mylar, plexiglass, crushed glass, and engraving on aluminum. The artist scanned small pieces of pyrite—also known as fool’s gold—and discovered unique interpretations of the mineral content. These imperceptible details were translated into life-size works that lean against the walls and hang low so one feels as if they are stepping into these undiscovered landscapes. Vibrant hues of blue, purple, and red pop out of dark and reflective backgrounds, creating supernatural vistas that encourage lengthy viewing.

Leslie Shows. Coupler, 2014; acrylic, ink, plexiglass, synthetic rubber, and wood on aluminum; 42 x 33 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA. © Leslie Shows.

The majority of the exhibition is devoted to new works that expand the artist’s interest in materiality and process. Incorporating forms of molds for casting—both for industrial and artistic production—and using natural and synthetic materials, the resulting works include both quiet studies and more bold compositions. Coupler (2014) belongs to the former category, with soft pink hues and a neutral palette carefully placed among the plexiglass, synthetic rubber, and wood on aluminum. The composition is reminiscent of an hourglass and held together by its formal qualities. Conversely, The Daybreak Star (2014) is a loud work by both scale and technique. The imagery consists of a galloping white horse and rider against, or amidst, heavy, dark brushstrokes that create an ethereal, cosmic sensibility. The 82-inch-high aluminum panel, on which the painting sits, is cut in two pieces and separated by a 5-inch gap. The negative space between the panels creates its own gestural mark, but a tension persists, as the two parts would not fit back together perfectly.

Leslie Shows. The Daybreak Star, 2014; ink, paper, and engraving on aluminum; 70 x 48 and 82 x 38 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA. © Leslie Shows.

According to curator Emily Stamey, quoted in the exhibition catalog, the title of the installation, Surfacing, evokes various meanings. While the term can be found in physics, as in an object or element rising to the surface of a liquid, there is also a more metaphorical definition, as in something appearing out of obscurity. Certainly Shows’ work expresses both these definitions, with her intense curiosity toward natural and synthetic processes that manifest as material explorations. While the works are rooted in the realms of the geological, scientific, and natural, they also read as Surrealist interior landscapes that inspire reflection and  contemplation, taking some time away from the banality of the everyday.

The works could be described as either painting or sculpture, yet few hang on the wall in the traditional rectangular form of painting; the laser-cut aluminum panels are connected like puzzle pieces, or as sheets of metal leaning against the walls. The collection reads more as an installation than as a survey. This ambiguity makes for a dynamic group of works that do more than just surface. They overflow with possibilities.

Leslie Shows: Surfacing is on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art through May 4, 2014.