“The Blinding Light” at (Slash), San Francisco

“The more complex the object we are attempting to apprehend, the more important it is to have different sets of eyes, so that these rays of light converge and we can see the One through the many.”
—Benjamín Labatut

There’s more to reality than meets the eye. In his nonfiction novel When We Cease to Understand the World, writer Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey through some of the most consequential scientific discoveries of the 20th century, which ushered in the age of Quantum Physics. With each discovery, a new set of questions emerges. Thus, Labatut concludes, any search for ultimate truths will lead you, again and again, to uncertainty or the unknown. 

“The Blinding Light” chooses to dwell in a place akin to the quantum realm, where things are out of focus and less defined. The exhibition brings together a group of national and international artists who navigate and blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, and between dominant official narratives and first-person experiences. Working across sculpture, moving image, and printed matter, they present speculative stories and counterhistories of resistance and survival—from revisiting moments of colonial contact to reclaiming embodied knowledge—to bring forth the possibilities of forgotten events and challenge fixed historical and political accounts.

Claire Fontaine’s site-specific installation considers which stories are told and which are neglected, expanding throughout the gallery space and acting as a stage for the exhibition to unfold. Manon de Boer presents a film that moves between visual absence and auditory presence to blur perception, memory, and time. Isabel Nuño de Buen’s materially dense and layered sculptures appear as archaeological fragments of a much larger, unknowable whole from a distant past or perhaps not-so-distant future. Carlos Reyes’ sculpture brings to light the infrastructures of power that are often unseen but felt, as Ana Vaz’s film gives breadth, scope, and embodiment to current ecological disasters brought by the legacies of colonialism. Raven Chacon invites us to take cues from our immediate surroundings and re-orient ourselves in relation to the land and its nonhuman inhabitants. Lastly, Ishan Clemenco translates the concerns of intonation and duration in music into treatments of surface and volume in constructed sculptures, marking and exposing intervals of geologic and human-made time.  

This exhibition offers an opportunity to slow down, find one’s footing, listen, and engage with a different, perhaps even anti-Enlightenment, way of thinking. It welcomes reflection on the relationship between the individual and our environment—natural and human-centric. This is an invitation to experience the world through its flip side, where history is porous, timelines are malleable, and the thresholds between the artwork, artist, and audience are uncertain.  
—Diego Villalobos

at (Slash), San Francisco
until April 19, 2025