Kuh Del Rosario

Summoning Black Beach
10.26–11.25.2023
Room 1

As one enters the gallery, they are met with a constellation of sculptures, the composition of which  simultaneously appear to be contrived yet, naturally occurring. They are an odd alchemy of  driftwood, recycled paper pulp, woven plastic packaging inspired by Philippine handicrafts, dried  flowers and weeds, hemp fibres, milkweed, and some encrusted with salt or dried rice flour  producing a crackle finish, seemingly weathered by the elements. These sculptures have a humility:  made of familiar — yet defamiliarized — materials, they sit low to the ground, circling a large pool  lined with black rubber which sits in the middle of the space. The pool is filled with salinated  water, conjuring the ocean. Like volcanic islands, smaller sculptures are perched on the elevated  topographies of the pool. The sculptures are both geologic features and diasporic bodies. In some of  the pieces, the artist embedded seeds that have traversed oceans and lands to be there. Both organic  and inorganic, the sculptures are charged with agency and full of life.

Each sculpture in Kuh Del Rosario’s Summoning Black Beach is a complete universe onto their own.  They are islands of possibility, in close proximity to each other, forming archipelagic lifeworlds, each  island a proposition of how to live in connection with all matter. The various materials of each  sculpture form an assemblage of relationality, each one an individual island in an archipelago of  similar but different islands in a sea of shared experience. The artist taps into what political theorist  Jane Bennett would call the “vitality” of materials¹. Plastic refuse and natural elements speak with the artist and tell her how to be in this world. These sculptures suggest that there is another way to  be with things — not to dominate, consume, and discard — but to be gently attuned to their truths and to co-exist alongside them.

Edouard Glissant suggests that the archipelago is an epistemological model that offers an aesthetic  and ethical blueprint for relationality². With over 7000 islands, the Philippines is a literal archipelago. Metaphorically, the archipelagic provides ways of considering various actants outside of national and  colonial formations. Literary scholars Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens define the  archipelagic as “a turn toward approaching islands, island-sea assemblages, and littoral formation  that goes beyond colonialist tropes”³. Arising from her diasporic Filipino consciousness, Del Rosario transgresses borders and hierarchies of value to build distinct, yet interconnected, intersubjective  moments in her material practice that serve as context for meaningful experience. Del Rosario’s  archipelagic lifeworlds are a collection of all the things that we need to bring together to holistically understand our material reality.

The work also asks how does one return to a place that no longer exists? While the artist immigrated  to Canada as a child, sensorial memories of the Philippines stay with her and constitute a significant  part of her aesthetic consciousness. Guided by her late father, Elmo, the artist recalls trips to a  clandestine beach of volcanic minerals near her ancestral home of Batan. A long drive, hike through  a mangrove forest, and through a clearing revealed the crystal-clear waters and the ebony shores of  this magical beach. In her journeys back since her father’s passing, Del Rosario has not been able to  locate it again. Its magnetite-rich sands may have made it a target for oil and gas companies. In the  age of ecological crisis and global capitalist extractivism, diasporic returns are especially vexed as the  land, water, and life are irrevocably changed or destroyed. Summoning Black Beach proposes an  alternative way to return and to reconnect with that which has been lost.

—Marissa Largo

1 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
2 Glissant, Édouard. 2010. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
3 Roberts, Brian Russell, and Michelle Ann Stephens. Archipelagic American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.