Rivane Neuenschwander

To paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “You can’t step in the same river twice.” But it was his follower, Cratylus, who, before renouncing speech altogether, amended this by noting that you can’t even step in the same river once. The Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander shares this laconic understanding of constant change. Her work is quietly transformative; and while previous readings have focused on such themes as digestion and cultural cannibalism, the artist’s latest exhibition is, literally, more global in perspective. In her time-lapse video Contingent, 2008, ants slowly but surely devour a map of the world made from honey. The fourteen “Carta d’Agua” (Rain Maps), 2008—a series of painted maps that were left at the mercy of Brazil’s rainy season, then reassembled and framed—chronicle a similar cartographic dissolution. Solid land has disintegrated into patchy lagoons, roads have been destroyed, boundaries washed away.

Each of the works addresses the reshaping of geography, but it is the larger works that really anchor this exploration as they fluctuate in real time. The giant aluminum basin of Continentals, 2008, is filled with murky, jade-colored water; on its placid surface float a cluster of four smaller aluminum bowls. Slowly, imperceptibly, they shift and turn in a geological ballet. In the microcosmic ceiling installation Continent Cloud, 2007, a translucent layer of plastic holds up millions of tiny Styrofoam beads subjected to sporadic gusts from timed fans. The result is an immersive inversion of a familiar terrain, where inlets, lakes, and mountains are created and destroyed in a perpetual metamorphosis.

With a deft attention to materials, Neuenschwander develops a set of simple constraints with which to frame incessant patterns of erosion and re-creation; this transformation is the artist’s métier. The exhibition’s expository logic and schoolroom aesthetic are balanced by her intimate, poetic topology. Gently, she asserts a “geopomorphism,” offering a view from the earth’s perspective.