Taking up residence

Sep. 22—You don't get out of a discussion with Oswaldo Maciá without contemplating some big ideas. Maciá, who specializes in sound and olfactory installations at museums, casually drops references to Aristotle in conversation, and if you ask him how he got into his line of work, he'll tell you we live in an "ocular-centric society."

"We try to solve everything just by a visual element," says Maciá, who will be one of two artists in residence with the opening of the Vladem Contemporary this weekend.

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM

Oswaldo Maciá will launch the Vladem's Frederick Hammersley Artist-in-Residence Program and his tenure will run for a month. Mokha Laget's will begin in late spring of 2024. The former Hammersley Foundation, which is now part of the Albuquerque Community Foundation, provides support for the residencies, and artists occupy the Vladem's Dee Ann McIntyre in Memory of Scotty McIntyre Artist Studio. Learn more about the artists at oswaldomacia.com, mokhalaget.com, or museumfoundation.org/vladem-contemporary.

"Day by day, the questions are more complex. We need more senses to understand the present," he says. "I read one neuroscientist who said that Aristotle is wrong. Five senses is nothing; I think scientists now are saying we have 23 senses."

Maciá will share the role of Vladem's first artists in residence along with Mokha Laget, and they're both excited to be a part of the museum's historic opening. Both artists are citizens of the world: Maciá was born in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, and later lived in Barcelona and London before moving to Santa Fe about five years ago. Laget was born in Oran, Algeria, and attended college in Washington, D.C. Both Maciá and Laget speak passionately about what it means to move freely around the world.

"Art is a global business. You cannot operate in one corner," says Maciá. "It's like being a fisherman. If you want salmon, you have to go to the North Sea. You're not going to find it in Santa Fe. If you want cod, you have to go to the Gulf of Mexico. If you want swordfish, you go to the Atlantic or the Pacific. You have to go to get things done; otherwise it's just a local concern, and the problems today are global. Climate change is global. Open The New York Times today. What do you read in big letters? The sea and the oceans are hot like never before."

Laget, who also works as a simultaneous French language interpreter and translator, says that the act of moving around the world has always informed and educated her art.

"One thing that's always been very important to me — maybe because I've been traveling most of my life — is the importance of refreshing your eyes," she says. "You can only do that if you leave the landscape you're used to. We have a word in French: 'dépayser.' It means literally to be out of country or out of your landscape. This is what happens when we travel. We forget completely where we're from to some degree. When we return, we're surprised we look at things in a completely different way. Things we just walk by or we see and don't look at."

Maciá is working on an octagonal sound sculpture for the Vladem that will evoke migration patterns of animals. He calls it El Cruce (The Crossing), and it has hints of animal calls and responses within the eight-channel recording.

"We are in constant movement, merging, crossing," he says. "The opposite of migration for me would be stagnation; that's when mosquitos grow in water. All of my work is a celebration of migration, but in a big picture, knowledge crosses the world when we move. Remember, in the Renaissance times, Leonardo Da Vinci, the surname Da Vinci came because he came from a city named Vinci. El Greco was working in the court of Toledo. He was Greek; that's why he was nicknamed El Greco. Wherever you come from, you get this surname in the Renaissance because artists were traveling the world for different reasons."

The artist created a sound sculpture for SITE Santa Fe that used 16 channels; the Vladem piece, he says, will not have a smell element because it's for an open-air space on the terrace, but it will have an ancient Basque instrument, the txalaparta, added for rhythm.

Maciá says he used his giant library of animal and forest sounds for The Crossing. For a previous piece, he went to the rain forest and recorded insects in order to mirror the sound of pollination.

"I love to work with multi channels because it's a way to control different volumes in different spaces," Maciá says. "You can play with time because it's an open space. It's beautiful to do something in this location because trains arrive at a particular time. You can manage the composition. You can give some silence so the train can become part of the piece."

Laget, a geometric abstractionist whose exhibition Perceptualism appeared at CONTAINER last spring (see "Shape shifter, March 31, Pasatiempo), moved her artist in residence term at the Vladem to the spring due to a number of other engagements. She spent part of September as a visiting artist and scholar at the American Academy of Rome in Italy, and her work will be part of Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, in October. When she gets to the Vladem, Laget says, she's planning a piece that will incorporate music.

"I'm looking to do an interpretation of the architecture of the Vladem into a performance sonification, but there will also be drawn visual scores," she says. "It will be multimedia, and it has to be outside, so we don't want to do it too early. [The Vladem has] that beautiful balcony. And then there will be other works that will be within the space itself."

Laget adds the location and intentionality of the Vladem are fascinating: The architecture had to be integrated into one of the oldest cities in America, and yet it had to house a collection of contemporary art.

"A building, for me, is almost like a body, like a protagonist," she says. "It has an outer skin. It has a skeleton. It has extensions. And though it's a human construct, humans are caretakers. The health of the building depends on that," she says. "There's this play of space and light, and we can never see the whole thing at once. We can only move around and our imagination takes over in terms of what's next. I think that's the mark of a really great building when you have all of these elements, and it's the living entity you're engaging with. The work that I want to do there is very much connected to the architecture and what is that communication with the community."

Laget has had shows in New York, Houston, and San Francisco over the last year and says she's looking forward to being back in Santa Fe and to be part of the inaugural history of the Vladem and what the institution may mean to the city over time.

"I've been here 30 years," she says. "There's an arc of history here for me with my art in the same way there will be an arc of history for the museum starting in the early 20th century. There are very early paintings from the art community going into a very contemporary space. People have already said, 'Well, we already have contemporary art spaces,' but this a collecting museum. It's quite different, and their purpose is different.

"And the fact that this residency is supported by the Hammersley Foundation and the Albuquerque Community Foundation, it's wonderful. Hammersley was a geometric abstractionist; we have a lot in common."