Exhibition: “Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance”

Installation view of Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance, LaiSun Keane, Boston, September 2–October 2, 2022. Featuring a collective installation, a work by Perla Mabel, and three works by Gina Goico.

I had the pleasure of working with artists Gina Goico, Perla Mabel, and Rixy on Communal Medicine, a group exhibition on view at LaiSun Keane in Boston a year ago.

Gina, Perla, and Rixy have individually explored abundance as an aesthetic strategy and political commitment oriented towards healing collective traumas. Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance brought their works into conversation to consider how their strategies of somatic engagement, world-building, and storytelling facilitate an expansive model of community care. The exhibition also featured their first collaborative work: a participatory altar installation.

In an essay about storytelling, disability, and justice movements, the historian and activist Aurora Levins Morales notes that, “We survive, when we do, because we are able to build webs of relationships, able to tend to each other, feed each other, able to chain ourselves to fences in loudly chanting groups, able to insist on our own stories about who we are.” Despite the salience of violent discourses and policies that render certain bodies and minds as dangerous, defective, and disposable, we survive. Linking individual needs with collective struggles, Levins Morales reminds us that the ability to heal and resist trauma exists not only within us individually, but also within our relationships to our communities. The paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Gina, Perla, and Rixy in this exhibition resonate with these sentiments and affirm the strategies of survival we carry individually and collectively.

You can read the curatorial essay here.

Rixy’s work in Communal Medicine was highlighted in “5 Talents From the Artnet Gallery Network We’re Keeping an Eye on as the Fall Season Kicks Off” on ArtNet News, September 14, 2022.