This is the Place, This Must be the Place

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art - University of Nevada, Las Vegas - 2021

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is proud to present This is the Place, This Must Be the Place, a collaboration between two artists who use text-based artworks to explore liminal spaces. Kyla Hansen and Krystal Ramirez use the Barrick’s Work Shop Gallery to establish a dialogue of shifted and distorted words that move back and forth between narration and abstraction. By introducing instability to written language, they create a space to explore impermanence in areas we like to think of as stable and fixed.

The exhibition centers on a visual exchange between an assemblage by Hansen and grids of typographical abstractions by Ramirez. Hansen's sculptural mural exists in the slippery space between two and three dimensions. She has created an arrangement of doors, literal areas of transition that host a patchwork of painted quilt-like patterns reminiscent of language. Ramirez responds with radiant monochromatic shapes that suggest recognizable letters and words. Her saturated palette nods to the combination of emotional fullness and conceptual openness that characterizes the work of Color Field painters and Modernists such as Mark Rothko. By deliberately “failing’ to connect through written texts, the artists raise questions about the authority and infallibility of language and communication.

They take their title from a statement attributed to the Mormon leader Brigham Young (1801 - 1877). “This is the place,” Young is alleged to have said in 1847 as he looked out over the landscape that would later become Salt Lake City. As they echo and distort his historic declaration, Hansen and Ramirez hope to prompt us to consider the relationship between language and the physical land we inhabit. What do places stand for? How do we create a claim to an area through our language? How is our language understood?

“Geographic spaces and their meaning change over time despite, and because of, cultural, political, religious, scientific, and personal declarations that often suggest stability,” the artists explain. “Lingering in unstable spaces of transition is uncomfortable. Looking for truths in the written language where there are none reminds us that it’s all merely anthropological perception. It’s not that everything you knew was wrong, it just always has the possibility to be organized differently.” This is the Place, This Must Be the Place asks us to think about those uncomfortable places where possibilities are “organized differently.”