3. Children in a Galápagos classroom working with Ann Hamilton on an audio performance piece about the islands. 4. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle filming on the salt flats in El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve.
Dario Robleto works as, in his words, a “materialist poet.” He
combines materials into forms that belie their own ingredients.
The materials list from one of his sculptures for the show, The
Ark of Frailty, could be a time-traveling naturalist’s collection:
“poplar, typeset on cardstock, hair lockets made of stretched and
curled audio tape recordings of ‘Lazarus species’ (species that are
rediscovered alive after being classi>ed extinct) in the wild,
nineteenth-century hair ?owers, nineteenth-century dried
?owers, lace and fabric from widows’ mourning dresses, colored
paper, silk, antique ribbon and buttons, carved animal-bone
buttons, homemade paper, willow, ash, white oak, milk paint,
glass.” Dario calls these lists “liner notes,” and they act as brief
clues to what he was thinking as he combined materials in layer
upon layer of meaning—not unlike the geological striations that
attracted him to Glacier National Park in Montana.
“There is a state of long-term suspension in freezing, but
also a precariousness to the glaciers’ potential of melting,”
said Dario, “that for me has always synced up with the stages
of mourning and grieving that humans go through on a daily
basis: wanting to suspend the pain, but knowing its ?ow can’t
be impeded.”
• • • • • • •
The artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle traveled to El Vizcaíno
Biosphere Reserve in Baja, Mexico. “When I made my initial
site visit, even as I stood on the deck of the ecotour boat witnessing the surfacing of a gray whale, I knew that, as an artist,
my real interest in this site lay in turning away from this
undeniably awesome image of nature . . . turning my camera
not on these ‘monsters’ of the deep (now the objects of our
belated protection), but rather on the behemoths of our own
making—the neighboring saltworks, jointly owned and oper-
A B O V E : Love Has Value Because It’s Not Eternal, 2008, by
Dario Robleto includes the sounds of melting glaciers and
lovers recording each other’s heartbeats. BE L O W: A viewer
watches Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Juggernaut, a short film.
