Brian Slattery Photo
Olguin.
On Tuesday afternoon, two piles of soil had been dumped in the corner of the back gallery at Artspace on the corner of Orange and Crown Streets. Two shovels protruded from the piles. Artist Ruben Olguin stood over a wheelbarrow, adding water to its contents, then mixing it with his hands. In a rack near the window, a row of bricks lay in the sun to dry.
Olguin was practicing a craft he learned from his grandfather — a craft millenia old — in the service of a new art project about who gets to use the earth, and for what.
Olguin is one of six artists participating in “Ball Snake Ball,” one of three new exhibits opening at Artspace on Friday. (The other two are “Hand Dug CT” and “Paying Homage”; see below.)
The title of “Ball Snake Ball” refers to a test of clay’s suitability for building.
“As a rule of thumb,” the accompanying text explains, “if clay pulled from the ground can be hand rolled into a ball-like shape, and then a snake, and back into a ball again, it passes the test for optimal malleability.” The six artists in “Ball Snake Ball” are molding clay to take on issues about environmental justice. For Olguin, that means sending a message about the rights of his people, the Tewa Pueblo, who live in northern New Mexico, to use the land they’ve been using for generations amid a maze of land ownership and government bureaucracy.
Clay from New Mexico.
Olguin began the project with a kind of political protest, by getting clay from places he wasn’t allowed to go. He hopped fences. He sometimes dodged gunfire from ranchers. “Sometimes I’m on federal land,” he explained, taking soil and avoiding Bureau of Land Management trucks who “can make us drop our clay.” The clay Olguin collected would allow him to work in a few colors — purple and green along with the vibrant cinnamon color of terra cotta.
In New Mexico, he explained, all the older houses are made of adobe — of mud — including the house Olguin grew up in. Making adobe was a “family institution,” Olguin said. “When I was six, my grandfather built an addition to the home.” He used the soil right next to the house to make the bricks, and taught Ruben to do it, too.
Olguin got his bachelors degree in cinematic arts from The University of New Mexico in 2012. He worked on the production team of a news television crew. He entered a program in a masters in fine arts from The University of New Mexico (which he completed in 2015) intending first to use electronics to make an “immersive” art. But then he started thinking about the adobe his grandfather had taught him to make. “The adobe mud was a cross-section of colonized and indigenous methods to create a home for people,” he said.
Plunging his hands into the mud to get the right mix of clay and water, Olguin smiled. “I immersed myself too far into it,” he said.
He thought of how ranchers, the government, and other property owners had carved up the land, but when he gazed over the landscape in New Mexico, the lines were invisible. “Animals and plants don’t care,” he said. “You can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.”
It got him thinking about “the temporary nature of our economic and political lines,” he said. “As people draw lines, the earth erases those lines. So we have to draw new lines.”
He planned his project at Artspace to consist of a large bowl built on the gallery floor, with a video projected into its center. In the video, Olguin uses mud to paint over an airplane map of the property lines drawn across New Mexico. As the bowl settles and the surface cracks, Olguin said, it’ll be hard to tell whether the lines are actually in the surface of the clay or part of the projection — feeding into the point of the project.
But first, he had to make the bricks. And to make those, he needed clay, which he got from Valley Sand and Gravel in North Haven.
“It fills me with warmth in my heart, seeing these giant piles of mud,” he said. “I have this pile of dirt and I’ll keep making bricks until it’s gone.”
Once he had the right mixture of dirt and water to make clay, Olguin pressed it into the rack he had set up by the window. He guessed that he needed at least 80 bricks to make the bowl and would probably make over 100. That would take him two full days. After that, he would build the bowl out of the bricks, then finish it with the clay from New Mexico.
The connection between Olguin’s work and the other two exhibits — “Hand Dug CT: Ceramicists in the Industrial Flow,” showcasing the work of a group of Connecticut-based ceramicists, and “Paying Homage: Soil and Site,” the exhibit born of the work of Artspace’s Summer Apprenticeship Program — was clear. To Artspace curator Sarah Fritchey, they all conveyed the sense of not being afraid to get your hands dirty, and to not be afraid to make art with whatever was around you.
“You don’t need a fancy studio to do this,” Fritchey said. “You can make art from anything.”
The opening reception for Artspace’s three new exhibits happens July 27, 4 to 7 p.m. at Artspace, 50 Orange St. Click here for more information.