Cypress College: Ground Control

Now on view at the Cypress College Art Gallery, Ground Control: Resource Extraction and the Demand for Sovereignty, is a group exhibition that brings together an international roster of 9 artists whose work is driven by a research-intensive critique of the transmutation of the natural world into capital. The collection of photography, installation, sculpture, video, painting and printed material on view revisits Eduardo Galeano’s seminal text Open Veins of Latin America, which fifty years ago shifted the dialogue surrounding the global south away from a focus on the presumed need for economic development. “In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy,” he wrote, “gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.” Subsequent historiographies have had to acknowledge the role that international monetary policy had—and continues to have—in enacting a project of dependency in these regions.

The projects on view in Ground Control grapple with the colonial legacy in Latin America. From the mining of mineral resources such as copper and petroleum, to the commodification and rarefication of public goods such as water and land, to the compelled migration and exploitation of human labor, the artists’ awareness of the forces of empire inflects their work.