With Juan Downey: Radiant Nature — part of the Southern California art initiative Pacific Standard Time LA/LA — curators Robert Crouch and Ciara Ennis have teamed up with the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Pitzer College Art Galleries to showcase multimedia works by Chilean artist Juan Downey (1940-1993) that have not been visible to the public for many years.

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Installation view of “Juan Downey: Radiant Nature” (2017)
Installation view of “Juan Downey: Radiant Nature” (2017) © Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

Radiant Nature centers on Downey’s theories of movement, mind, and psychogeography. The exhibition is organized into three areas: video work, performance documentation, and archival material, focusing primarily on the artist’s early work, which carefully studies the aforementioned topics. On the walls are photographs of performances that took place in New York, while the center of the space is occupied with various video pieces Downey orchestrated. One particularly striking piece is an enlarged photographic documentation of a video-performance, Nazca, which took place at The Kitchen in New York in February 1974. With this performance, Downey highlighted the devastation of the natural environment caused by the construction of the Pan American Highway, a road that connects South and North America. The artist traced the outline of a bird in ancient geoglyphs and lay still in the center, as two performers, Carmen Benchat and Suzanne Harris, moved diagonally across the space, with white chalk filling their shoes and coating their faces. The residue of the white chalk on an otherwise intact geoglyph symbolizes human interference in natural sites.

The political and cultural topics addressed in Nazca mirror perfectly the effect the artist sought to elicit, that of a traceless, invisible intervention in space — one that can remain telepathic and out of the physical realm, once the artwork has run its course. The only traces that remain are the photographs taken at the time.

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