Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances
Left: John Cage, Score
Without Parts (40 Drawings by
Thoreau): Twelve Haiku, 1978.
Color hard and soft ground
etching with drypoint, engraving, and sugar lift aquatint. A.P.
5/10, Ed. 25, 13 x 18 ½ in.
Publisher: Crown Point Press/
Collection of the John Cage
Trust. © John Cage Trust.
A John Cage print could be read as an archaeological
site. The compositions often remind one of an aerial
view or an excavation. Could we think of the opposite:
reading an archaeological site through chance
operations? Probably a different idea of time would
evolve from this methodology.
— Mariana Castillo Deball
Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances
presents an archaeological search for absence
and a study in the gaps of memory. What role
does chance—in the form of lapsed time, erosion,
fragmentation, and human intervention—play in our
subjective interpretation of history?
By lingering on the unknown histories of
artifacts, Deball underscores the effects of natural
and social processes within archaeological
narratives. The exhibition presents a new vision
of archaeology—one that acknowledges ghosts,
double visions, and multiple versions of history.
The artifacts unearthed through Deball’s research
originate in local archives but gesture toward
sites much further afield: the ancient Mexican
civilization at Teotihuacan, ceramic funereal
traditions of the Southwestern Mimbres culture
and their echoes in Mayan pottery, and the
carved stone reliefs of pre-Columbian cultures
throughout Central America. Through large-scale
fragments, rubbings, ceramics, and fresco works,
Deball overlays and blends these disparate
narratives, splicing them together into a collage
of archaeological time.
Below: Color slide of mural
fragments, ca. 1976–1985.
Courtesy of the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco.
Composer and visual artist John Cage
theorized that the unknown can be a productive
force in art-making, that indeterminacy creates
space, and can open up new concepts of time.
Using a randomized script based on his chancebased scores, Deball has choreographed the
placement and movement of her artworks and
architectural framework throughout the duration
of the exhibition.
Deball employs Cage’s philosophy on chance
as a tool of archaeological inquiry in order to
evoke time and challenge the human urge to
produce fixed meanings from our past.
Mariana Castillo Deball: Feathered Changes,
Serpent Disappearances is organized by SFAI
Assistant Curator Katie Hood Morgan with
SFAI + Kadist Fellow Christopher Squier.
FEATHERED CHANGES, SERPENT DISAPPEARANCES
Mariana Castillo Deball
SFAI + KADIST ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
Mariana Castillo Deball uses installation,
sculpture, photography, and drawing to explore
the role objects play in our understanding of
identity and history. Engaging in prolonged periods
of research and fieldwork, she takes on the role
of the archaeologist compiling found materials to
reveal new connections and meanings.
Deball has participated in major international
survey exhibitions including the 8th Berlin
Biennale, dOCUMENTA (13), the 54th Venice
Biennale, the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, and
Manifesta 7. She is the recipient of the Preis der
Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst, the Zürich Art
Prize, the Ars Viva Prize, and the Prix de Rome.
Deball lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
SFAI + KADIST
Above: John Cage, Changes
& Disappearances, No. 21,
1979–1982. From a series of
35 related color etchings with
photoetching, engraving, and
drypoint in two impressions
each. Ed. 35, 11 x 22 in.
Publisher: Crown Point Press/
Collection of the John Cage
Trust. ©John Cage Trust.
Mariana Castillo Deball is the inaugural
artist-in-residence of the SFAI + Kadist
partnership, which annually commissions new
works, supports artist-curated projects, and
awards a post-graduate curatorial fellowship.
The partnership is a unique platform to
extend the education and public engagement
missions of both institutions. Throughout the
development of Feathered Changes, Serpent
Disappearances, Deball has been assisted
by recent SFAI graduate and SFAI + Kadist
Fellow Christopher Squier (MFA 2015).
APRIL 14–JULY 30, 2016 | WALTER AND McBEAN GALLERIES
Above: Teotihuacan mural
fragments from the Wagner
Mural Bequest, ca.1983–1985.
Courtesy of the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco.
Left: Fragments from the
Wagner Mural Bequest, ca.
1976–1985. Courtesy of
the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco.
Exhibition Object List
The following works are arranged along a continuous architectural intervention throughout
the upper and lower galleries—a material imagining of nonlinear time composed with ropes,
cylinders, and tubing.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
1. This series of new ceramic sculptures builds
upon the principal of the “kill hole” in Mimbres
(Southwestern United States) and Mayan
pottery (Mexico and Central America). A single
hole chiselled through the center of an artifact
entered it into ritual territory, providing both
passage for the dead and termination of the
utilitarian object in a single gesture. In Deball’s
work, the “kill hole” suggests the negative
condition of the object, focusing on absent and
missing sections of artifacts and contributing
to a picture of the vast unknown.
2. Harald Wagner’s collection of Teotihuacan
murals (bequeathed to the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco in 1976) are at the center of an
unsolved mystery of excavation, black market
sales, and circulation both illicit and legitimate.
In the course of the object’s life, illegible
crumbs with little relevant historical information
were separated from the larger frescos, but
nevertheless retain status as valued objects in
the museum’s collection. Borrowing the format
of these crumbling murals, Deball intervenes in
their iconography and scale to produce original
fresco sculptures in cement, lime plaster, and
pigment, casting new light on the disregarded
Teotihuacan fragments.
5. In order to preserve the iconography of classic
Mayan sites, archaeologist Merle Greene
Robertson (1913–2011) developed a unique
method of documentation, molding wet Japanese
paper into the grooves of stone altars, stelae,
and wall reliefs until it formed a duplicate paper
“skin” on the surface of the artifact, ideal for ink
rubbings. Deball has repurposed this transfer
technique to record the surface of a concrete
“light cannon” from the SFAI’s 1969 Paffard
Keatinge-Clay extension, applying and expanding
this historical technique to Brutalist architecture
and the present day.
6. John Cage’s etching Changes and
Disappearances #27 (1979–1982) is presented
alongside the maps and scores Cage used to
determine order, color, and placement of its
elements. These works were printed with uniquely
shaped copper plates using multiple printmaking
techniques including photoetching, engraving,
and drypoint by master printmaker Lilah Toland at
Crown Point Press.
John Cage
Changes and Disappearances #27 (1979–1982)
Color etching with engraving, photoetching,
and drypoint, Ed. 2; 11 x 22 in.
3. On loan from the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco, this reproduction represents
the Teotihuacan mural Feathered Serpent and
Flowering Trees as transcribed by the museum’s
Arts of the Americas department for study.
Numbered segments correspond to colors
in the Munsell color system, a specialized
color-modelling system that allows researchers
to match color variation according to value,
hue, and chroma.
Handwritten score and seven maps for #27
Feathered Serpent and Flowering Trees
8. Endless spiral with varying rhythms, used as
a wooden printing instrument.
Mimeograph reproduction of drawing of mural
Score: Pencil on paper; 10 ½ x 26 in.
Seven Maps: Pencil on tracing paper; 18 ¾ x 24 in. ea.
Collection of Kathan Brown
7. Taken from Cage’s series of prints Dereau
(1982), this large geometric sculpture translates
an original print into three-dimensional space,
adapted to a physical experience of Cage’s
chance-based ideology.
fragments including color notations, ca. 1983–1988.
Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
8.
4. Another reference to Feathered Serpent and
Flowering Trees, this concrete sculpture lies
fragmented along the steps of SFAI’s amphitheater. Here, Deball reverses the conservation
process to return the serpent—fabricated of
molded cement—to the disjointed state of the
original murals after excavation and looting.
SFAI and the artist wish to thank those who
generously lent artworks to this exhibition:
the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
and Kathan Brown. Special thanks also to
Matthew Robb, Sue Grinols, Joseph del Pesco,
Mari Andrews, Valerie Wade, Laura Kuhn,
Joel Skidmore, Khristaan Villela, Javier Manrique,
Megan O’Neil, and Diana Magaloni Kerpel.
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