HOUSING Presents Taína Cruz: "Woodland Sermon"

About

HOUSING is pleased to present Woodland Sermon, a solo exhibition by artist, Taína Cruz. In this body of work, Cruz summons the spirituality and mysticism of a 400-year lineage of healers and enchanters. The artist invites the viewer to become part of a ritual where magic reverberates across all aspects of modern Black life — everywhere and in everything. Woodland Sermon will be on view at HOUSING from September 7th to October 23rd, 2022. 

Following her NADA debut with HOUSING earlier this year and a solo show with Embajada in Puerto Rico, Taína Cruz presents post-internet aesthetic scenes of maroons traversing the Dismal Swamp alongside black kettle cauldrons and sorceresses playing with snakes in her first stateside solo exhibition. Pointed, impish ears, wide eyes, and sinewy figures punctuate Cruz’s visual iconography across a diverse range of media. Drawing upon ancestral knowledge and the modern influences of growing up in Harlem, Cruz incorporates and remixes contemporary imagery with ancient wisdom to create her dynamic and creole visual language, unlocking new modalities of magic. 

Cruz’s artistic process sustains her family’s 400-year history as practitioners of West-African and Caribbean folklore. Due to the asynchronous nature of Black spirituality, the preservation and perpetuation of this practice is an urgent and necessary task, vital to its survival. These untold stories speak from the past and look into the future, swirling temporalities together to unveil ancient rituals as alive and essential to Black communities and to Cruz. Black spirituality has been consistently demonized throughout history, villainizing Black practitioners to deny them personhood and render them as “other.” Alluding to these caricatures becomes an act of reclamation, from which Cruz’s work acts as a reparative ritual. 

Incorporating ghosts throughout her works, Cruz activates a ritualistic storytelling through which the vitality of the ghosts can serve as a nourishing act for her ancestors. As seen in Take this here root with ya, three sisters that could, or could not, be ghosts appear alongside their spirit guides with pieces of High John root amongst them. Typically used in African American traditions and folklore, High John root holds supernatural powers and is known to give strength. Possibly still stuck in limbo, the three sisters take in their spirit guides’ whispering secrets and consider the High John root as the only way to transition to heaven. 

The rawness of Cruz’s work lends it power and agency, as the artist recounts her ancestors' stories and customs with her own hands. Many of the ghastly qualities in Cruz’s work not only recall the spiritual realm, filled with ghostly appearances halfway there, but also an earth-bound humanity. The soft pastels and airbrush strokes Cruz applies to watercolor paper are reminiscent of digital painting techniques, yet deeply and materially rooted in the dirt beneath her feet. The juxtaposition of digital aesthetics and earthly media also resonates in her video and sound work, where technological elements stimulate the senses, like many of their analog counterparts used in rituals.

Through her works, Cruz acknowledges and presents the epistemologies of her ancestors not as something secret to be kept under lock and key, but as something inherent and embedded within the everyday: prayer is everywhere if you can find it