MOCA TUCSON PRESENTS NEW EXHIBITIONS OPENING MARCH 24

Raven Chacon: While hissing
&
Na Mira: Subrosa 

Raven Chacon: While hissing

March 24 - October 22, 2023

MOCA Tucson presents While hissing, an exhibition by artist, performer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon that celebrates sound as a medium for resistance and connection. Through video installation, graphic scores, and performance, Chacon amplifies Indigenous women’s voices, centering their leadership and vision both as carriers of memory and authors of culture. 

The installation features For Zitkála-Šá (2018), a collection of thirteen graphic scores dedicated to contemporary Indigenous women making music or other expressive cultural contributions, spotlighting artists like Joy Harjo, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Laura Ortman. The series is a tribute to Zitkála-Šá, a Yankton Dakota composer, writer, poet, activist, and teacher who wrote The Sun Dance Opera in 1913, which is considered the first American Indian opera. Chacon conceptualizes these scores as portraits, composed of variations of lines, dots, shapes, and symbols, accompanied by poetic written instructions. Each score can be interpreted and performed by their namesake and others, Chacon writes: “Everyone who encounters this set of scores is invited to perform them, to better understand where they have been and where they are headed, and to consider all the sites of conflict they are placed between.” 

The exhibition’s title refers to the instructions for performing Chacon’s score for flute and breath dedicated to Barbara Croall, acclaimed Odawa First Nation composer and musician. MOCA will commission and present a new set of prints of the thirteen scores and stage performances of selected scores in collaboration with local musicians in Tucson.

While Chacon’s graphic scores resonate within the imagination, enlivened periodically by performances, the artist’s three-channel video installation Three Songs (2021) are focused on voice and instrument. Filmed on Navajo, Cherokee, and Seminole lands, the videos depict three Indigenous women—Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington (Yuchi), and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole)—each playing a snare drum and singing in her language about the history of the land. Their songs tell stories of sites where a battle took place, or violence or displacement occurred, such as the Navajo Long Walk and the Trail of Tears. Today these lands remain contested and the films bear witness to past and present injustice. 

Together, For Zitkála-Šá and Three Songs use sound—imagined, recorded, and live—to create a space for each woman’s individual contributions to resound. Chacon creates a multidimensional tribute that amplifies stories of survival, resistance, and creativity while opening up new channels for listening.

Raven Chacon: While hissing is organized by Laura Copelin, Deputy Director and Co-Chief Curator and Julio César Morales, Executive Director and Co-Chief Curator, with assistance from Alexis Wilkinson, Assistant Curator.

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Na Mira: Subrosa

March 24 - October 22, 2023

MOCA Tucson presents Subrosa, the first solo museum exhibition by Na Mira, an artist who uses intuitive and experimental processes to create immersive moving image installations. MOCA has commissioned a new chapter of Mira’s project imagining White Dust From Mongolia, an unfinished film by the late artist and author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In Subrosa, nonlinear films, radio transmissions, and the color red bleed together to touch the edges of memory.

The exhibition features two pieces shot on 16mm film and infrared video in Los Angeles and South Korea: Noraebang, a new commission for MOCA, and a two-channel installation, TETRAPHOBIA (2022).  Both films are guided by Mira’s dialogue with Cha, who worked with structuralism, fragmentation, poetry, and Shamanism throughout the 1970s. The film White Dust addresses the military occupation of Korea and its impacts on migration and language, and was left unfinished at the time of Cha’s murder in 1982. Informed by her own Korean matrilineal history, Mira engages the materials and gaps within Cha’s archive to attend to collective experiences of diaspora. Expanding on the original plot where two characters meet inside a memory, Mira follows Cha’s script, revisiting charged sites and recording scenes at a theater, a house in Seoul, and a portrait studio, allowing her own performance, autobiography, and witnessing to transmute the story. 

In the gallery, each reel of unedited black and white footage is arranged side by side in the shape of an unfolding cube and plays simultaneously to allow multiple points of entry. Mirrors within the installation double, reverse, and refract images off the screen and across the floor. Informed by her ancestral practices and the fallible nature of technology, the artist invites synchronicity into her process. As such, the works are animated by glitches, light leaks, and the soundtrack of a Korean radio station that began playing from a microphone in Mira’s studio while filming. These errant frequencies cause the films’ narratives to shudder and multiply, colliding past and present. 

The exhibition’s title, Subrosa, means “under the rose,” an ancient reference to secrecy, and evokes red, a color that permeates the exhibition. Red supports film’s development in the darkroom and the architecture of the cinema because its long waveform is the first to drop out of sight. Moving through the installation, red flickers in and out of view; by placing the images at a threshold of disappearance, Mira looks toward another realm.

Na Mira: Subrosa is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Assistant Curator.

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