Index of /Artemisa Clark

And those of the city, who were in the streets below, shot at the women with arrows and darts, which pierced them through the sides, so that they received many wounds, because their golden armor was so weak.(2018-present)

January 22, 2019
Performance: 2 hours
Post-performance installation: Gold paint; Dimensions variable
"The School for Endurance Work," curated by Carole Frances Lung
Cal State LA Fine Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Nails: Erin Chavez

August 10, 2018
Performance: 2 hours
Post-performance installation: Gold paint; Dimensions variable
"Separation," curated by Alexis Bolter
Tin Flats, Los Angeles, CA
Collaborator: Angie Jennings
Nails: Erin Chavez
Documentation: Ting Ying Han, Stacie Jaye Meyer

June 9, 2018
Performance
Duration: 2 hours
"MexiCali Biennial: Calafia: Manifesting the Terrestrial Paradise," curated by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, and Daniela Lieja Quintanar
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA
Nails: Erin Chavez
Collaborator: Rebeca Hernandez

And those of the city, who were in the streets below, shot at the women with arrows and darts, which pierced them through the sides, so that they received many wounds, because their golden armor was so weak.

- Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Las sergas de Esplandián (1510)

In this series of performances, another womxn and I, both of us Latinx, lie a few feet away from each other on the floor, motionless and staring at one another. We are naked and painted gold. Based on the Spanish novel Las Sergas de Esplandian (1510), we recreate and extend the dying moments of two soldiers from an all-female army of Amazons from the mythical island of California whose armor proves too soft to protect them. I use gold reperatively, reclaiming a natural resource pilfered from those native to the Americas, but even when reappropriated for our own protection, it cannot save us and indeed exaggerates our objectification. Our bodies become symbolic and literal sites of the fetishization of female, Latinx, and Latin American bodies and pain.

Yet playing dead is a survival mechanism that allows those doing so to evade capture. It is also the only position through which my fellow soldier and I are able to recognize and extend each other’s lives. Shared horizontality is generative, creating an Undercommons in which subaltern bodies see, speak to, and live for one another in the very institutions that continually try to keep them out. I have performed this piece many times, in many locations, reflecting the ubiquitous nature of this erasure. Beginning in January 2019, I have performed iterations in which I ask the audience to take the place of my fellow soldier. They lay across from me on a golden body print. We rested and resist together and for one another.

After the performance, two gold body prints are left as an installation for the run of the exhibition.