[-empyre-] Sor Juana in the time of Corona

[Christina McPhee]

dear -empyreans-, it's lovely to reconnect with you after a long hiatus on
my part. I share with you some text based research around a new body of
large scale drawings called Shapeshifters. The work draws from several
sources. Chief among them are the notorious Enigmas of Mexican Baroque poet
Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, in a fairly new translation by Stalina
Emmanuelle Villareal (chapbook, Señal Press, published collaboratively by
BOMB Magazine, Libros Antena Books, and Ugly Duckling Press, 2015). These
propelled a series of studies in 2019 and big drawings in 2020. The large
drawings, on handmade Japanese purple washi, are currently hanging in the
LA area with Irenic Projects. The exhibition is curated by Mike Hernandez (
www.exilechild.com)  Of course, the installation is physically inaccessible
for the present time. It was designed to show alongside the Christian
season of Lent. Now we will extend its duration.

For a sense of the exhibition, a link:
https://www.picuki.com/media/2250370623389268394
Or go to irenicprojects on Instagram.

Famous for their mysterious questions, the brief clutch of “Enigma” poems
have snared readers for around three hundred fifty years, since Sor Juana
Inéz de la Cruz (1648-1695) wrote them in the Viceroy of New Spain. Sor
Juana Inéz, illegitimate daughter of a nobleman and a creole woman, was a
self-taught polymath who entered the convent to secure time and space for
her research. Writing from within colonial, patriarchial oppression, she
meticulously crafted lines of inquiry coded with lures for ‘woke’ readers
of the time, whilst confounding enemies of her thought, like Vatican
censors, via obfuscation. The poet asks: “What is that audacity/ with such
great presumption/ that possibly being reason/fakes being idiocy?” (Enigma
13) (translation Villareal).


For each of the drawings, I collate a line from one of the Enigma poems.
For example, Enigma 8:

http://www.christinamcphee.net/trekking-toward-a-hellish-plight-caminando-al-tormento/

This link goes to an image of the drawing together with information about
its materials and scale.


Enigma 8 in full:

¿Quál puede ser el contento

 que, con hipócrita acción,

por sendas de recreación

 va caminando al tormento?


Here is Villareal's translation to English:


What can be the delight

that with hypcritical gesture

along pathways of leisure

goes trekking towards a hellish plight?


Contentious, paradoxical, and perverse, Sor Juana presides, saint-like,
over this strange realization at the exact moment that the current
contagion spreads. She matters now because her writing grapples with the
paradoxes of speech and community in a time when many sense the capacities
for horror in the 'failed state.' She rough-rides language, raking verbs
into scathing compounds. She leaves us to experience the raw force of
uncontrollable events as she withdraws from view.

Looking forward to honoring this time of courage and resistance in the
spirit of Sor Juana,


---Christina

@xtinamcphee on IG

http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/projects/1-2-shapeshifters-drawings-2020/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20200402/366e5ec0/attachment.html>