Under Three Things, 2018-20
Archival inkjet print and on-site performance at NOMA, experience the virtual version of this performance created in March of 2020 here.
“At select intervals throughout the run of Ear to the Ground, the New Orleans-based artist Cristina Molina hosted a series of intimate guided tours of the exhibition in which she assumed the perspective of the earth, personified. Drawing upon cultural mythologies of the underworld, or underground, Molina guided museum visitors through a whispered exploration of the exhibition in which the different artworks in the show constituted the topography of an imagined underground landscape.
Inspired by the classical myth of Persephone, who was doomed to spend a third of the year in the underworld as a bride of Hades, Molina offered a counter-narrative to the well-worn interpretation of Persephone as victim. Her performance reimagines this mythological figure as an empowered goddess of the underworld who harnesses the power and potential of the earth to reposition the underworld as a place of primordial cultural emergence.”
-Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2018