Allyson Vieira at Daniel Faria Gallery

Artist: Allyson Vieira

Exhibition title: You Too

Venue: Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Date: September 9 – October 14, 2023

Photography: all images courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present You Too, Allyson Vieira’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

“There’s a ‘we’ in here.¹” Stretching, folding, and twisting speculative futures and ancient pasts from her position in the present, Vieira’s community is a transhistorical one. You Too continues her investigations of labour, craft, and the material evidence of time, while considering the knowledge, mythologies, and forms of communication that we inherit from the past and reiterate to the future. Eight large-scale tapestries stretched between scaffolding post-shores create new architectural spaces within the gallery. Made from plastic bags woven into construction debris netting, they bear textual and iconographic messages, some easier to decipher than others.

The text in the weavings comes from the Human Interference Task Force (HITF): an ever-changing think-tank of anthropologists, semioticians, nuclear physicists, behavioral scientists, linguists, engineers, architects, and other academics first formed by the U.S. government in 1981. Charged with marking sites of buried nuclear waste, the HITF’s goal is to create physical and linguistic deterrents that will be understood by human beings 10,000 years in the future. The texts proposed thus far, and which Vieira uses in her work, read more like Homeric poetry than they do futuristic alarms:

This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

The HITF also quotes “Ozymandias,” ² the 1818 sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which a traveller encounters the ruins of an ancient statue in the desert, with a pedestal that still reads: “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Written over two-hundred years ago, about a ruler that lived thousands of years before that, the poem’s warnings about the mercilessness of time and follies of power are echoed in the HITF’s words to the future, “We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”

Vieira’s weavings are typeset in boustrophedon, a type of bi-directional text found most commonly in archaic Greek manuscripts and inscriptions. In English translation, the Greek word boustrophedon means “to turn like oxen,” shifting from left-right to right-left like the plow-lines in a field. This obsolete way of writing offers a snaking form of linearity full of loops backward and re-starts, much like Vieira’s handling of time itself.

Vieira’s iconographic weavings, all titled Kai Su, are iterations of ancient apotropaic (from apotropos, “to turn away”) imagery: eyes, gorgoneion, vulvas, and phalluses. There is a reciprocal relationship between the apotropaic image and that which it is warding off. Kai Su, “you too” in English, protects the speaker through that same inversion. Like the HITF—who, in community with humans deep in the future, strive to communicate with them—Vieira’s adoption of ancient apotropaic icons puts her in community with the past. The contemporary warnings of You Too communicate from the present to the future, and from the future back to us.

Allyson Vieira holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York and an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Company, New York; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo; The Breeder, Athens; Swiss Institute, New York; Kunsthalle Basel; and Laurel Gitlen, New York. Other projects include A Tour of the Monuments of Storm King Art Center at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor; Frieze Projects 2015, New York, curated by Cecilia Alemani; The High Line, New York, curated by Cecilia Alemani; and Public Art Fund at Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, curated by Andria Hickey. Her first major catalog, Allyson Vieira: The Plural Present, was published by Karma Books in 2016. Her book of interviews with Greek master marble carvers, On the Rock: The Acropolis Interviews, for which she was the recipient of grants from the Graham Foundation, the Henry Moore Foundation, and FLACC was published by Soberscove Press in 2019. She lives and works in New York and is Assistant Professor of Foundations at the Corcoran School of Art and Design at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

[1] Allyson Vieira, in conversation with Classicist and humanities scholar Brooke Holmes, “Building a Transhistorical We: Allyson Vieira and Brooke Holmes in Conversation,” X-TRA, Winter 2019
[2] Coincidentally, Ozymandias was also the title of Vieira’s 2010 exhibition at Laurel Gitlen in New York.