Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance curated by Juan Omar Rodriguez: Gina Goico • Perla Mabel • Rixy

LaiSun Keane is pleased to present an exhibition curated by Art Historian and Curator, Juan Omar Rodriguez titled Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance featuring Gina Goico, Perla Mabel and Rixy on view from September 2 to October 2, 2022. 

Gina Goico, Perla Mabel, and Rixy have individually explored abundance as an aesthetic strategy and political commitment oriented towards healing collective traumas. Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance brings their works into conversation to consider how their strategies of somatic engagement, world-building, and storytelling facilitate an expansive model of community care.

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 Goico, Mabel, and Rixy in this exhibition resonate with these sentiments and affirm the strategies of survival we carry individually and collectively.

ESSAY by JUAN OMAR RODRIGUEZ