VOLUME and the Angels Gate Cultural Center are pleased to announce Todo en ti fue naufragio, a group exhibition curated by VOLUME member Jared Baxter, featuring works by Sarah Cain, Patricia Fernández, Liz Glynn, Amy Howden-Chapman, Allison Keating, Olga Koumoundouros, Karen Lofgren, Matana Roberts, and The Distance Plan with Oliver Kellhammer, Greg Lindquist, k. Flint, and Gabriela Salazar. Todo en ti fue naufragio will take place at the Angels Gate Cultural Center as part of their year-long Curatorial Takeover series of grant-funded projects, which respond to the site’s proximity to the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach as well as its history as a former military training barracks. Taking its title from a line from a Pablo Neruda poem, which literally translates to “everything about you was shipwrecked,” the exhibition will examine both literal and figurative vessels in their relationship to rupture and remembrance, disaster and struggle. Featuring new and previously-exhibited works by a range of Los Angeles-based, national, and international artists, narratives of life and death on the water open onto a reflection on the cataclysm of the present moment, as a kind of siren song and prophetic mourning. Olga Koumoundouros will present a new multi-media work that will function as a point of both origination and destination — both the Old World and the New. A map of sorts is scribed into the hand-crafted birch surface of a table rigged with silk wings. Prints will be pulled from the evolving wood-cut surface during the course of the show, culminating in an interactive print workshop where members of the public are invited to make their own prints taking place on Saturday, August 3rd, from 12pm to 4pm. Todo en ti fue naufragio will also host the annual exhibition of Patricia Fernández’s Box (a proposition for ten years), a complex archival project containing variegated elements drawn from seven years of her work, including a rock from the Pyrenees found along the path used by exiles fleeing Franco in 1939, a day bed, and a model of a ship to be made at life scale posthumously, containing both the artist’s own bones and that of others, to embark on a voyage after her death. Karen Lofgren’s sculpture Lorelei will be exhibited publicly for the first time in ten years, providing new audiences an opportunity to experience this early work by an influential Los Angeles artist that draws from mythological imagery of sirens that lure ships to their doom. This exhibition will also serve as the Los Angeles debut of the visual works of New York-based cross-disciplinary artist Matana Roberts. Widely acclaimed for her work as a saxophonist, improviser, and mixed-media sound conceptualist, her practice encompasses a deep engagement with boats and waterways as well as the history of the African diaspora. The show will feature examples of her visual scores, which challenge the colonial imbalance associated with the propagation of Western musical notation. Amy Howden-Chapman’s photographic collage works bridge the gap between the global and local scales at which climate impacts occur, visualizing the displaced effects of transportation emissions which manifest ubiquitously but remain overlooked in our everyday encounters with freight. The Distance Plan, a collaborative project centered on connecting the arts with climate action, presents four new entries from the ongoing project Climate Change & Art: A Lexicon (edited by Howden-Chapman and Abby Cunnae). The Distance Plan invited Oliver Kelhammer to define Ruderal-Systems; Greg Lindquist defines Rolling Coal; k. Flint considers what Aerial imagery has meant for climate knowledge; while Gabriela Salazar’s sculptural work which rekons with the impact of Hurian Maria on Puerto Rico is juxtaposed with a definition of Less Cement. These lexicon terms cumulatively consider the role of shipping and global supply chains in conveying commodities from coffee to concrete to coal, and point to how vulnerable these systems are to climate impacts. In Sarah Cain’s work, dollar bills are removed from ordinary circulation to take on a new significance as a material support for painting. Works from Liz Glynn’s 2014 exhibition On the possibility of salvage present papier-mâché recreations of artifacts recovered from shipwrecks and lost civilizations, alluding to the role of piracy and illicit cargo in the production and effacement of history. The exhibition will also host the edition launch of Allison Keating’s On Death Paper Tape, to take place on Saturday, August 24th, from 12pm to 4pm. The On Death Paper Tape is a paper print of the video documentation of a performance that took place in Los Angeles at 8pm on February 9th, 2019. In the space of this one-night-only performance, which by design was as energetically potent as it was fleeting, lies Keating’s reflection on “why stay alive?”–an existential question posed after a friend’s suicide and Trump’s detrimental renouncement of the Paris Climate Agreement. Appealing to the viscera of its audience with collaged visual metaphors of life-high mimicry and imaginative facsimiles of death (giant flies, hooded tap dancers, a choir), this cathartic unfettered release was bounded by the self-imposed limitation of Keating’s ultimate purpose–the creation of a paper tape. Consisting of over 38,000 frames laid out over 1,107 pages, which if preserved properly can last more than 500 years, the work deepens the exhibition’s engagement with climate change, questions of futurity, and the role of the archive in an ever-increasingly precarious world. Calendar of events: Saturday, August 24th, 12pm to 4pm — edition launch of Allison Keating’s On Death Paper Tape