Patricia Domínguez: Three Moons Below

17 September - 25 October, 2024

Cecilia Brunson Projects presents Three Moons Below, a major new body of work by Chilean artist, educator and activist Patricia Domínguez. As one of the leading creative voices at the intersection of art, science and ecology, Domínguez’s futuristic and otherworldly imagery is shaped by the wide scope of her research which spans South American spiritual practices in plant healing, ethnobotany and cutting-edge scientific thinking. Three Moons Below is the outcome of Domínguez’s Simetría Residency, which gave her access to the quantum physics experiments at CERN as well as the ESO astronomical facilities in Chile. This rare access to each of these spaces enabled Domínguez to produce her most ambitious project so far: an urgent yet playful invocation for a more harmonious relationship between technology and nature.

 

 

Patricia Domínguez lives and works in Puchancaví, Chile. Alongside her artistic practice, which spans video installation, painting, ceramics and sculpture, she is the founder of Studio Vegetalista, an experimental platform for ethnobotanical research based in Chile. Domínguez’s multidisciplinary practice is represented in leading programmes in art, science and ecology, currently on view in the exhibition ARTEONICA at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in California as part of the Getty’s PST-ART initiative, and earlier this year in the first Klima Biennale in Vienna, and the Serpentine’s General Ecology programme in London. Other projects and exhibitions this year include: Future Ours, co-curated by Domínguez with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jeppe Ugelvig and currently on view at the UN General Assembly in New York, the Modern Mondays screening series at MoMA, New York (11 November), Cosmotechnics at FACT Liverpool (opening 8 November) and Intinerarios XXIX, Centro Botín in Santander (opening 23 November).

 

 

Electric Saga - Watercolours

 

Presented alongside the film is a series of meticulously detailed watercolours, painstakingly produced over several months. Domínguez’s highly technical style is informed by her training in botanical illustration, another point of convergence for art and science. The works are punctuated with precious and semi-precious stones, amplifying the celestial and luminescent quality of the watercolours. Domínguez reminds us that the machinery at CERN, commonplace devices such as our phones, and even seemingly immaterial technologies including artificial intelligence rely on quartzes and mined metals, and seeks to reconnect her otherworldly imagery with the earth.

 

Domínguez imagined that she would be inspired to record the machines she encountered on the Simetría residency. Instead, what emerged was a sequence of increasingly fantastical and incorporeal images. Through these paintings, Domínguez describes unattainable desires, previously unimaginable, unlocked in her by the theoretical teachings of astronomers and quantum physicists at these facilities. She left the residency with an expanded understanding of our infinite connections across our universe, an awareness of the extreme limits of our perception, and a yearning to feel and decipher these connections.

 

Frequently pastiching science fiction aesthetics, Domínguez also turns to images and concepts from Catholicism, indigenous cosmologies and other spiritual practices to make sense of abstract theories introduced to her on the residency, such as quantum entanglement.