a solo exhibition featuring the work of Devin Balara
opens Saturday, Jan 13, 2024 with an opening reception 7-10pm;
the exhibition runs through April 12, 2024
304 w Crest Ave, Tampa, FL 33603
an interview with the artist by Erin Jane Nelson forthcoming
BLUE HOLE is Devin Balara’s investigation into geological epistemology. Working with the materiality of earth elements to question how we learn, and the power of giving way to the brain’s associative desire.
Anchored by a shell-encrusted sun, the exhibition’s layout shows two solar system orbits, visualizing how our caretakers often predict our future. We find ourselves repeating the same ticks, coping mechanisms, and gestures, in the same way the earth spins on its axis in a perpetual spiral around a dying star.
Meditation on a place often gives way to a shared headspace inhabited by memories of who we spent our time with there. Processing this grief requires us to flip a rock. In this exhibition, Balara inhabits and centers the underside of Florida, a complex literal and metaphorical space littered with precarity and awe.
Limestone aquifers prohibit basements and dry underground caves crack into sinkholes, absorbing our memories and precious goods. Basements and caves overlap as signifiers of the personal subconscious and the land’s subconscious. This limestone, made of crushed shell bodies and fossils cemented over time by pressure is crumbly, unstable, and holey, suffering the same effects time has on our memories.
The language of the works situates shells for their million-year-long metamorphosis, mimicking Coquina, a variety of soft limestone. Iconicly used as a building material for Spanish colonizers, Coquina is representative of the 1513 encounter that collided nations and landscapes. Immersed in the waters, collecting its shells, unpredictable insecurity embodies our tendency to bargain with the soil.
Affixed to our dual realities (the ven-diagram of oblong planets) are book-scale pages ripped from note taking, the margin doodles that bring us a pleasurable escape in absorbing other’s theories. Like pushing a pin on a map to locate one’s origins, these small archeological steles are adorned with stained glass for a zoomed-in index of icons. Here, glass–another metamorphosed state of sand that lends itself to transparency and vibrant color–alludes to the diagrammatic aesthetics of geology textbooks.
Along the walls, flattened dimensional grids represent a cross section where physicality meets theory: our attempts to understand and visualize an eons long process of the shifting earth.
In Gallery 2, Balara has crafted a window depicting geologies of Florida and our universe at large, scaling to both micro and macro views using a hypersaturated color palette. Opposite sit a pair of 3D rendered triangles, speculative and impossible excisions of earth, arranged like up and down arrows.
Balara’s practice is informed by research as a departure point for the more intuitive making process where certain elements come forward and others are left behind in the gaps, mirroring the gaps underground, the instability and precarity of the myths of solid ground, complete knowledge, and emotional recovery.
BIO:
Devin Balara was born and raised in the Tampa Bay area and is taking this exhibition as an opportunity to dive deep into the specific geologic history of the place she grew up. Devin’s metal and glass sculptures function as large-scale drawings, science communicators, material curiosites, and future fossils. Devin earned an MFA in sculpture from Indiana University in 2014 and has been pretending to be a geologist since 2020.
