Ground Control

Cypress College Art Gallery presents Ground Control, Resource Extraction and the Demand for Sovereignty.

October 5 through November 22, 2023

An exhibition of artworks that address historical patterns of resource extraction from Latin America and their traces in contemporary life, particularly as they impact housing in Southern California. Curated by Stephanie Sabo.

Ground Control: Resource Extraction and the Demand for Sovereignty is a group exhibition that brings together an international roster of 9 artists whose work is driven by a research-intensive critique of the transmutation of the natural world into capital. The collection of photography, installation, sculpture, video, painting and printed material on view revisits Eduardo Galeano’s seminal text Open Veins of Latin America, which fifty years ago shifted the dialogue surrounding the global south away from a focus on the presumed need for economic development. “In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy,” he wrote, “gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.” Subsequent historiographies have had to acknowledge the role that international monetary policy had—and continues to have—in enacting a project of dependency in these regions.

The projects on view in Ground Control grapple with the colonial legacy in Latin America. From the mining of mineral resources such as copper and petroleum, to the commodification and rarefication of public goods such as water and land, to the compelled migration and exploitation of human labor, the artists’ awareness of the forces of empire inflects their work.

The SUR:biennial, now in its 7th cycle, has sought to explore the complex notions of globalization and exchange that take place in the ambiguous geographical, cultural, and artistic borderlands between Southern California and the broader South. Each independently curated exhibition showcases recent and newly commissioned works by local and international artists influenced, in one way or another, by the cultures and artistic traditions of Mexico, Central and South America, and/or the Caribbean, including their many diasporas.

The 2023 SUR:biennial includes exhibitions at sixteen different locations throughout Southern California.