Jennifer Zackin: Killamanta Kutimusaq (To the Moon and Back)
January 22—June 18, 2006A meeting in the United States with a Peruvian ceremonialist led artist Jennifer Zackin to travel to South America in 2003. There, she visited the Q'ero people, a native group from the remote, eastern side of the Andes, known for their unique textiles. Zackin subsequently has returned to Peru to live with the Q'ero for extended periods—resulting in a remarkable body of work, which combines found objects from the modern world with symbols from Q'ero culture.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presented a solo exhibition of Zackin's work, Killamanta Kutimusaq (To the Moon and Back), from January 22 to June 18, 2006.
Since the late 1990s, the intersection of ritual and ceremony with textile craft traditions has been the basis for Zackin's work. Those who saw Zackin's Katonah and Socrates Sculpture Garden tree-wrapping installations learned more about the ideas behind her work with this exhibition. Killamanta Kutimusaq, which included sculpture, collage, and video, wove together an intuitive response to Q'ero tradition with a documentary approach.
Works in the exhibition included Hanaqpacha Intiq, a hanging sculpture constructed out of a used military parachute covered with colorful woven pom-poms based on the designs found in the Q'ero's traditional hats. The exhibition's title piece, Killamanta Kutimusaq, was a freestanding sculpture that resembled both the Apollo space capsule and Apachetas, ritual stone piles built by both the Inca and the Q'ero to capture and focus natural energies. The sculpture was wrapped in vinyl printed with a satellite image of the Peruvian landscape. The piece also incorporated a multi-layered sound track of recordings of Icaros, sacred songs that are used for healing by traditional shamans in the jungle lowlands of Amazonia. Zackin also exhibited eight posters and a mandala-like wall installation fashioned out of Coca leaves.
Killamanta Kutimusaq comes from the Quechua language, a language derived from Incan. Meaning, "To the Moon and Back," the title suggested both the remoteness of the artist's journey and the fundamentally different way traditional cultures view the universe. Traveling back and forth between extremes of belief, Zackin has endeavored to inject the sacred and meditative nature of ancient craft into the contemporary context of global consumer culture.
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