Marcos Lutyens and Laray Polk
The Trinity River Project
The Liliana Bloch Gallery is proud to present a new exhibition: the Trinity River Project, a collaboration by Marcos Lutyens and Laray Polk. The Trinity River Project is a story told though journalism, performance, and the visual arts.
The project began October 10 with the publication of ten essays written by Laray Polk, with one posted daily for two weeks on D Magazine’s news blog, FrontBurner. Each essay focused on different facets of the Trinity River–ecology, hydrology, activism, politics, and building schemes. On October 22, Marcos Lutyens led three guided meditations based on those themes in an outdoor setting along the old river channel with a view of downtown Dallas. The essays and meditations complete the first and second phase of the project.
The third phase of the project, a visual exhibition, will open on November 19 at the Liliana Bloch Gallery. As an exhibition, the Trinity River Project will feature artifacts from both the written and participatory portions of the project and will include drawings, objects made of natural materials, water samples from the Trinity River, video, and recorded meditations.
As collaborators, Lutyens and Polk seek to provide an opportunity for the viewer (as reader and contemplator) to become uprooted in their perceptions of the Trinity River, then re-rooted in the spirit of new possibilities. “Rivers,” Lutyens says, “are the lifeblood of the landscape just as circulatory systems map themselves throughout the body. History always finds itself layered along the banks of a river, and the Trinity is no exception.”
Marcos Lutyens’s practice has centered on the investigation of consciousness to engage the visitor’s embodied experience of art. Exhibitions of infinite scale and nature have been installed in the minds of visitors. His investigations have included research with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raeilians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers and mental architects to explore how unconscious mind-sets shift across cultures and backgrounds. Lutyens has developed projects that involve our external surroundings. Works include interactions with pedestrian flows, social media dialogue, air quality levels, animal and biological intercommunication.
Lutyens has exhibited internationally such as at dOCUMENTA(13), the Venice Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, Manifesta, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Royal Academy, the National Art Museum of China, MoMA PS1. He worked in alliance with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on the 14th Istanbul Biennial, where he also created a large scale installation on a ship, as well as preparing the public program ‘Thought Forms and Brain Waves: Neuro-Aesthetics and Art,’ which included some of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Lutyens recently launched his book ‘Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days.’ Present work in development includes projects at the Guggenheim NY, The Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels.
Laray Polk is a multimedia artist and writer. Her interests include politics, media analysis, nuclear nonproliferation, and climate change. Her articles have appeared in print in the Dallas Morning News, D Magazine and In These Times and online at Rural America In These Times, Common Dreams, CounterPunch, Pacific Free Press, Sri Lanka Guardian, and Znet. Her multimedia exhibitions include Gaza Zoo (a project centered around the politics of captivity) and The Beautiful Obstacle (a history of the military-industrial complex at MIT). Research projects include the study of Cambodian palm-leaf manuscripts at Cornell University, interviews with Navajo Code Talkers in New Mexico, and travel to living Maya communities and archeological sites in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve.