Glen Echo Park's Stone Tower Gallery presents intimate exhibitions of work in the Park’s most historic structure. This gallery is a welcoming space for visitors and is well suited to solo or themed exhibitions featuring a small group of artists.
Saturdays & Sundays | 12pm to 6pm
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RSVP (preferred, not required)
The Stone Tower Gallery presents Woven Ground, a solo exhibition by artist and ethnographer Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida. The exhibition uses textile sculptures to map the emotional topographies of the afterlives of 20th century political violence in trans-pacific Chile. ”While much scholarly and public attention has been (rightfully) paid to studying the history of political violence and dictatorship in Chile and Latin America more broadly, the roles of non-human, affective, and environmental actors in political violence is less theorized,” says Borgsdorf. Using critical materials like copper, salt, wool, and cotton, Woven Ground is a celebration of weaving as a daily rhythm of and gesture towards verticality.
Artist Statement
The soft sculptures, weavings, salt crystallizations, quilts, and videos I make are not images, but rather, textures. They congeal and materialize what it feels like to live a life in the emergent trans-Pacific diasporas following 20th century dictatorships—a life after apocalyptic violence, loss, grief, and unknowability.
Throughout the 20th century, extractive mining and agricultural projects in Chile have spurred forms of political violence. Local activism to resist extractivism—for example, the movement to nationalize copper production in the 1970s—have been met with swift and unrelenting repression. It is from this history that the Pinochet civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) emerged and brutalized its opponents. Despite the nation returning to democratic rule in 1990, the post-dictatorship era is continually haunted by controversies surrounding accountability, justice, and truth. For, while Pinochet’s junta has long been gone, the economic and political institutions he created live on, and Chileans contend with extreme economic inequality and neoliberal economics prioritizing free trade over social services. The dictatorship’s unresolved legacies continue to define Chilean public life. Yet, the roles of the critical materials — copper, wool, salt, and cotton, amongst others — in the formation and maintenance of these economics continue to be overlooked.
As a diasporic Chilean, I work in a trans-Pacific world thrown together in the face of the mass migration of Latin Americans in response to extractivism, political persecution, and economic inequality. My work as an ethnographer documents the stories and images of this worlding. As an artist, I am interested in how critical materials associated with this history can be assembled in ways that capture how post-dictatorship life feels. In my installations, I utilize my ancestral textile traditions to create affective exchanges, whereby the materials and objects I work with have the potential to sweep viewers up into the uneasy and ambiguous feelings about history, memory, and violence that haunt the trans-Pacific world.
Artist Biography
Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida is an emerging Chilean-American fiber artist and ethnographic researcher, working in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. His work combines experimental ethnography and South American weaving, natural dye, and soft sculpture traditions to highlight the afterlives of 20th century political violence in Chile and the broader trans-pacific world.
Borgsdorf’s practice focuses on the afterlives of the Augusto Pinochet civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990). Understanding that the dictatorship’s beginnings lie deep in Chile’s copper mines and its afterlives in the rubble of abandoned torture camps, Borgsdorf theorizes with critical materials such as berries, sheep’s wool, copper, cotton, and salt to investigate the roles of non-humans, affect, and rubble in the production and memorialization of violence.
Borgsdorf has exhibited in curated group shows at Room 3557 (East Los Angeles), Mile 44 (Los Angeles), Launch LA, and the Korean Cultural Center of Los Angeles. His artwork and research have been published by the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Santiago, Chile) and En Tránsito gallery (Santiago, Chile). In 2024, Borgsdorf was an Iburra Arts and Research Resident at Blue Light Junction (Baltimore, MD) and an AllPaper Curatorial Seminar Fellow at the Benton Museum of Art (Claremont, CA), and he has held curatorial roles at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and multiple National Park Service institutions. Borgsdorf graduated with a BA in Anthropology from Pitzer College with studio training in ceramics, fiber arts, video art, and printmaking.
Susan Stacks
A Momentary Immersion
October 5 - November 3, 2024
The Stone Tower Gallery presents A Momentary Immersion, a solo exhibition of drawings by artist Susan Stacks. These drawings are records of a moment of processing. They are fields to review potential problems, identify hierarchy and community among subjective features, and opportunity for convergent problem-solving.
Artist Statement
This series is about finding comfort in interstitial spaces – the formless, liminal forms we’re squeezed through or trapped under that become more personalized and intimate than any intended destination or purpose. Flattening types of actions, counts, pressures into shades, shapes, and dots recontextualizes the trials of one location and lays it out on another landscape for assessment. The finished work is a record of this processing, a depersonalizing of problems to find convergent solutions in their structure.
Artist Biography
Susan Stacks lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and shows with Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington, MD.
Jill McCarthy Stauffer
If Saltwater Heals Wounds
January 11 - February 16, 2025
Artist Statement
Jill McCarthy Stauffer’s work explores the transmutation of natural spaces through memories, myths, and digital manipulation. In local and coastal ecologies, they see metaphors for transformation, growth, cycles of death, and the hope for restoration. Mixed media installations combine personal experiences of light, sound, and shape in nature with scanning and natural samples in order to unify both qualitative and quantitative experiences of natural places. Stauffer negotiates the increasingly interconnected relationship between technology, memory, and nature — the quality of the representation of natural landscapes in digital interfaces, built with materials mined from the earth, increases as the natural environment is further degraded. At the core of the work is a sense of anticipatory grief - of fear for a future where natural spaces are primarily experienced through digital media in the absence of the original, and how this shapes our relationship with the natural world.
Artist Bio
Jill Stauffer is an installation artist from Pembroke Pines, FL, currently living in College Park, MD. They are a third year MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of Maryland, College Park where they also work as a Teaching Assistant. In 2019, Jill received a BA from Middlebury College with majors in Studio Art and Architectural Studies. Jill has participated in artist residencies with NE Sculpture, Josephine Sculpture Park and Snow Farm. Notable exhibitions include the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Juried Exhibition at TF Green Airport, Currents at NE Sculpture Gallery, and LevelUp at the Brentwood Arts Exchange, where they received the Juror’s Award. Jill’s research at the intersection of art and technology has been recognized by their reception of the ArtsAmp Interdisciplinary Grant and the Clarvit Research Fellowship from the University of Maryland. Their work has been featured in articles by the Washington Post and the Independent RI. In addition to their art practice, they have worked in support of community arts organizations as an arts administrator and teaching artist. Jill creates mixed media installations that explore the transmutation of the natural environment through digital documentation, artificial replication, storytelling, and memory.
Exhibition Concept Statement
If Saltwater Heals Wounds features three new media installations that reference the coastal ecologies of southern Rhode Island, as warped through the memory and digital replication of the artist. Stauffer negotiates the increasingly interconnected relationship between technology, memory, and nature - the quality of the representation of natural landscapes in digital interfaces, built with materials mined from the earth, increases as the natural environment is further degraded. Starting with organic coastal debris collected in these ecologies, Stauffer explores how different methods of documentation (2D scanning, 3D scanning, photography, video recording, and audio recording) augments and alters memories of light, sound, shape, and movement in the environment. Using the products of these documentation methods (3D models, images, recordings), Stauffer devises digital replicas of natural phenomena occurring in these ecosystems as a method of preserving their own memories of these natural spaces in an era of rapid change.
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