Voices of the Desert
Cherish Marquez: Voices of the Desert
Union Hall
1750 Wewatta Street, Suite 144, Denver, CO 80202
November 18, 2021-January 8, 2022
Admission: Free
Review by Carissa Samaniego
Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the desert. What does it feel like? What do you see? Who do you see?
Undoubtedly, we have unique desert experiences, but I’m willing to bet that your visualization included sandy terrain, wide open space, and blazing-hot sun. And it’s no wonder considering that linguistically desert is synonymous with barren, empty, desolate, uninhabited, and infertile. Cultural representation has traditionally claimed the desert as a masculine space for cowboys, prospectors, and misfits. Our collective imagination watches outlaws and loners struggle through thirsty desert landscapes.
An installation view of Cherish Marquez’s exhibition Voices of the Desert at Union Hall in Denver. Image by Raymundo Muñoz, courtesy of Union Hall.
If you’d like to see something different when you imagine the desert, Cherish Marquez offers us a counter narrative in her solo exhibition at Union Hall called Voices of the Desert. Marquez uses imagery, animation, natural materials, virtual objects, and tactile experiences in this exhibit to capture the quiet, humble wisdom that you can find in the desert. The artwork offers a slow look at a cast of non-human characters symbolic of desert life who share glimpses into an unseen mystic consciousness.
Two gallery visitors interact with Cherish Marquez’s A Piece, 2021, dirt, barrel, desert plants, and vinyl label. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Union Hall.
At first, as you walk into the gallery, the tone of the exhibition appears grim and dystopic. You encounter a 55-gallon steel barrel sitting on top of a patch of sandy dirt as if it’s been plucked from a landscape. It’s labeled with a radioactive symbol and a QR code, which introduces you to the first of a series of virtual experiences Marquez has created for the exhibit. Using your phone camera, the QR code takes you to an Instagram filter to interface with an animation of 55-gallon barrels falling from the sky onto a desert landscape. The animation is a virtual 3-D object that you can scale, rotate, and place into the real-world environment visible through the frame of your phone’s screen. The barrels of toxic material in both the physical and virtual world suggest a destructive outcome to the extractive practices to which we expose the desert: drilling, fracking, mining, and quarrying.
Cherish Marquez, Yucca, 2020, 3-D rendered animation and dried yucca stalk (on the right) and other works in the Voices of the Desert exhibition. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Union Hall.
Beside this installation sits a dried yucca stalk and a monitor looping a digital animation of stylized yucca seed pods that appear to be floating in an abyss—again, pairing natural and virtual objects. Moving further into the exhibition space, you can see that Marquez has set up a number of these relationships between plants and digital representations, repeatedly emphasizing a world of mixed reality. The dried matter in these vignettes is symbolic of desert plant life: yucca, creosote, silverleaf nightshade, and devil’s claw seed pods. Mesmerizing animations and interactive virtual 3-D objects create opportunities to explore multiple dimensions.
Two gallery visitors interact with Cherish Marquez’s I Am Here With Others, 2021, video game, using the Topography of the Sierra Blanca fabricated game controller, 2021, fabric, conductive fabric, Arduino, flora, USB cord, conductive thread, yarn, and string. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Union Hall.
There is another opportunity to interact with Marquez’s virtual world in I Am Here With Others, where you can freely explore a landscape as you would a first-person video game. The controller itself is an artwork, descriptively titled Topography of the Sierra Blanca. You can navigate the virtual terrain with a touch sensitive device woven into handsewn fabric layers that represent, in relief, the place of exploration. Sierra Blanca peak is an iconic geographical and cultural landmark of southern New Mexico and this reference grounds the exhibition in the Chihuahuan Desert.
Cherish Marquez, Topography of the Sierra Blanca (fabricated game controller), 2021, fabric, conductive fabric, Arduino, flora, USB cord, conductive thread, yarn, and string. Image by Raymundo Muñoz, courtesy of Union Hall.
Flanked on the east and west by the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, the Chihuahuan Desert is the most biodiverse desert ecosystem in the world sprawling across 200,000 square miles that span state and national borders. [1] This region is a prehistoric seabed, evidenced by fossils of Paleozoic life and mountainous fossilized reefs that surround the Permian Basin. Just a few months ago, an archeological discovery along the sandy shores of ancient Lake Otero (nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Madre within the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument) shifted scientific theories of how North America became populated. [2] Human-made footprints found in the sand provide evidence of a long-established narrative in the indigenous culture and tradition in the region: the Chihuahuan Desert is a site of origin.
Cherish Marquez, The Others, 2021, Devil’s Claw seed pods taken from the Chihuahuan Desert. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Union Hall.
In Chicanx ethnohistory, the mythical motherland of Aztlán has significant cultural and geographic ties to the Chihuahuan Desert. Depending on the source, Aztlán conjures up a real or imagined place. It is the ancestral home of pre-Columbian Mexica civilization and a speculative space for imagining mestiza futures. Marquez is actively centering a queer Latinx perspective in her art making. To contextualize Voices of the Desert within the Aztlán diaspora creates another layer to the origin story at work.
The Chihuahuan Desert is a homeland and the voices present in Marquez’s work speak of an “alter-native” understanding of place and our relationship to it. Alter-culture and alter-native knowledge are terms introduced by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, a Chihuahuan Desert native herself, to describe interventions that interrupt dominant narratives, situating a culture between indigenous and colonized worlds. [3]
On the left: Cherish Marquez, Voices, 2020, 3-D rendered animation; on the right: Cherish Marquez, Land, 2021, 3-D rendered animation. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Union Hall.
The borderlands of the Chihuahuan Desert, where Marquez herself too was born, have witnessed repeated colonization and extraction of the land. Voices beckon from inside the mixed reality world built in the exhibition, and these voices bear witness to generations of land abuse. These voices call for us to pay attention to the natural wonders of the desert and to open our eyes to the human exploitation of our motherland.
A view of Cherish Marquez’s I Am Here With Others, 2021, video game. Image by Erynn McConnell, courtesy of Union Hall.
Rather than drilling, fracking, quarrying, and taking advantage of the land, Marquez wants you to understand the desert from the perspective of the land itself. Instead of imposing narratives of civilizations onto the land, the voices entice you to learn more about the natural wonders in the desert. The yucca stalks, the creosote branches, and the voices you’ll hear whispering are quietly nudging: “Look a little closer to the life and history of the desert. Learn what you can from this place, not just what you can take from it.”
Carissa Samaniego is an interdisciplinary visual artist and writer based in Colorado. Her work and research focus on the intersection of place, knowledge systems, and identity. This focus is based on her own experience growing up in between a reserved community on the Minnesota prairie and a twelve-generation Nuevomexicano family in the U.S./MEX borderlands.
[1] https://www.nps.gov/im/chdn/ecoregion.htm.
[3] Garcia-Merchant, Linda Frances, "Mulcaxitl: A Performance of Chicana Methodology" (2020), ETD collection for University of Nebraska - Lincoln, AAI28001291: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI28001291.
