The Brooklyn Rail

What does the underneath sound like, what is the Earth telling us, what sorts of motions will create a dialogue for a human to become its hum? Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s multi-media installation “Sonando el Suelo / Sounding the Ground,” is a grace note of sublimity, activating just such a hum. Curated by Nick Herman the exhibition weaves together selections from different projects with an emphasis on the materiality of her new book, The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons Press).

The exhibit situates me out of the city’s architecture into my own—into the reaching out of an unfolding depth—where rocks with invisible spirits play Casio keyboards insistently, bridging a question of dwelling and listening, between survival and mechanism, the pelvic floor of our poetic immersion—to talk to the rocks as they talk to us.

In finding sentient allies that heal the rift between individuals and their environment, I think of Pam Montgomery’s book on herbology and healing, Partner Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, which considers restoring the relationship of Earth as a partner. To then bring that ideology into sound as a sacred space is to acknowledge community as an artform, one room at a time.

And the expansive topographies within Hinojosa Gaxiola’s work—Terry Riley’s borealis of chords, JT Bullitt’s Earthsound Project where seismic sensors record earth, our passing street outside the gallery window, who we are as tensile opportunists—echo the drawings and text pieces on the walls, visual totems as scores for vibrational porosity, the receiver witnessing the messenger.

I think of narrative structure, however loose, as the result of cause and effect—a metaphysical reality presented in Nick Herman’s catalogue essay as an entry into Lucía’s work, which then connects to poetics and structure as its own impulse. As wires stretch across the gallery floor, the cause and effect of language as a stream of temporal sine waves becomes a visceral landscape to explore, to lay down in.

Our unspoken cosmic dust trails crave distance as fuel—that amount of self-care for what we’re allowed—that a room as a sound as a city as a worshipped canvas—could re-station inner breath as a walk beyond body circuit—to breathe the sound of movement is what art’s impulse does to human impulse—to energize sound as empath, the desert floors of our metro-hydrogenies, the gyres of trace as alchemical properties, the room its own oracle, each visitor their own somatic notation—but I wander...

I place the phone on my lap to see the video of Hinojosa Gaxiola performing her rock concerto with a keyboard, whose ephemeral wish that morning was to sit and be played, not expecting rock as its partner. If energy is its own re-assembler, it is the softer landing that matches the excavated—the murmur of a body in residue, murmuration as communal artifact. I am looking for the object placed on my personal keyboard, as if the size of a galaxy were in my hand—where I am excavating, what I am choosing to excavate out of my knowing, a way to make sense of a world out of hand, by hearing underneath it.

The object of language, its listening, the embodiments of its approach that compose our existence — our approach to approach—is reciprocal. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola explores generosity as a reciprocal action, to dissolve into another’s space by allowing space its action.

It’s in this simple yet profound gesture, that the underlying resonance of her work takes root—to allow existence its communal environment, to approach the visitor with approach. Beyond sensory stimulation, the act of receding to the visitor shows enormous trust in us as humans—to accept another’s space, starting with ground, our shared sounding.