Porto Alegre, Brazil
Lives and works in Los Angeles
From the solo exhibition Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion at La Kunstalle Mulhouse (2021) to more recent solo shows at the Frye Art Museum of Art, Seattle (2023) and the MCA Denver (2022), the artist has knit terrestrial histories of resource mining and their material detritus with the imminent colonization of life in space. Take Future Geography (2021 – ongoing), a series made by flattening, cutting, and weaving Amazon delivery boxes with NASA images of the Moon, Mars, and stars and galaxies. The laborious process of construction quite literally intertwines capitalism on Earth and the commercialization of space, translating the unrelenting drive of extraction into shimmering tapestries pulsing with the energetic geometries of Brazilian Neo-Concretism and the seduction of a shiny new object.
Elsewhere, the presence of fossilized trash and three-dimensional casts of objects—ranging from the silicone cast of a decomposing Sycamore Maple tree in Death by Heatwave (Acer pseudoplatanus, Mulhouse Forest) (2021) to the skin-like latex cast of the Volkswagen automobile model Brasília in Transplated (VW Brasília, 2012)—conjure ghostly traces of the afterlives of consumption. The artist has contemplated the effects of industrialization since early bodies of work focused on the Amazon region. In the video installation Streamlined: Belterra, Amazónia/Alberta, Michigan (2013), for instance, Clarissa Tossin layers footage of two nearly identical Ford Motor Company towns in the Brazilian Amazon and Alberta, Michigan to produce a disorienting portrait of global production.
Another important focus in Tossin’s work is the co-optation of pre-Columbian iconography in the 1920s Mayan Revival style architecture prevalent throughout Los Angeles. The single channel video Chu’u Mayaa (2017) foregrounds the Indigenous symbology of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House through a dance performance by Crystal Sepúlveda, whose movements draw from gestures and postures found in ancient Maya ceramics. Her subsequent film Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing (2022), included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, New York, centers on two other Mayan Revivalist landmarks in LA, the Sowden House and the Mayan Theater. Clarissa Tossin and her various collaborators use poetry, spoken word, music, and glyph-writing to perform a kind of healing ritual that re-signifies both spaces within a Maya lineage. That Tossin sees moments of dispossession as opportunities to play, to introduce speculation, is most poignant in the film’s soundscape. Unfamiliar sounds coming from 3D-printed replicas of Maya wind instruments held in pre-Columbian museum collections fill our ears, offering not an authentic reconstruction of the past, but an open invitation to question the ways history is made and codified.
Clarissa Tossin received a BFA from the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil in 2000 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009.
— Mariana Fernández
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions