HOME AS A HOLE

Ash Stone + tom manzanarez

August 03 - September 02, 2023

after/time gallery Portland, OR.

TO DIG A HOLE

FOR ASH STONE AND TOM MANZANAREZ

ON THE OCCASION OF HOME AS A HOLE

Jason N. Le

August 2, 2023

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For what reasons do we dig holes?– To discover that which was dormant, to bury the deceased, to traverse layers upon layers of compressed histories, to till the land with the foresight of a future present, to prepare foundations, to hide the things we wish to forget, to search for potentiality, to punish the felons of both small and large offenses, to escape the confinements of one place with the hope of ending up in another less confining place, to desperately search for life-giving water, to mine precious stones and valuable metals and machine-powering oils, to create shelter.

To dig a hole is a play of contradiction: to give and to take, to destroy and to make anew.

The act of digging a hole conceptually foregrounds the work of Ash Stone and tom manzanarez for home as a hole, a collaborative exhibition of transdisciplinary work that addresses the action in both its literal and metaphorical conception at the complicated intersectional nuances of their upbringings and identities. For Stone and manzanarez, the act of digging a hole is at once exploratory and confrontational, revealing the many and complex components that structure their foundations. Here, I wish to dig alongside them, to mine the ways that their selected materials act, enact, and perform nuanced identity that overlaps past influence with present action.

As we grow older, take on the experiences of life, and move temporally further and further away from childhood, formative memories and foundational moments of our youth get buried under newer, more recent experiences. Although they are out of immediate sight, they undoubtedly lie there below the surface. What was once shiny and fresh and pristine takes on soil and dust, its initial allure muddied by an ecology of compounded time and gradual entropy, all the while composing the present structure we stand upon.

When we introspectively excavate the many layers of our identities, we dig deeply into parts of ourselves that may have been forgotten (consciously or otherwise), we confront every little thing and moment that has contributed to the current present of ourselves. We begin to pick apart individual components and look at the role they play in our larger image. In gardening, a good, nourishing soil is made of many things with particular purposes: peat or coir for substantive composition and moisture retention; perlite for aeration and easy drainage; powdered limestone to balance acidity; compost, bat guano, kelp, fish bones–discarded offal, often perceived as trash, broken down to its essentials–for vital nutrition. These are the materials that ultimately give life to, feed, and allow that which is buried in it to grow and thrive.

A breakdown of the top layer of Stone’s and manzanarez’s work reveals a soil-like composition of seemingly disparate materials: bottles of Fabuloso floor cleaner, a clothesline of slices of American cheese, a floor mat of empty bags of Hot Cheetos, a gallon of bleach, some all-purpose flour, an empty box that once held oranges from California. These particular materials carry with them the markers of a certain image of working class America, of which Stone and manzanarez proudly come from. They are items easily and readily found in the aisles of convenience stores and supermarkets. They indicate not only the American dream of suburban living and the fantasy of being just rich enough, but also the reality of its near unattainability for many racialized, minoritarian subjects.

Beyond socioeconomic affiliation with the working class, Stone and manzanarez use these materials as disidentificatory allusions to their embodiment of their Mexican American heritages. José Esteban Muñoz describes disidentification a survival tactic of minoritarian subjects wherein they work to neither identify nor counteridentify with often toxic and sensationalized characteristic assumptions of minoritarian identity, but rather to “[work] on, with, and against [this] form at a simultaneous moment.”[1] While the materials of Fabuloso and Hot Cheetos often allude to a (harmful and weaponized) image of a “hot and spicy” latina/o/x citizen working an underpaid custodial job to make ends meet, they begin to prove vital to Stone’s and manzanarez’s representation of their ethnicity in neither a blind affirmation of its stereotyped perception nor a naive rejection of its real presence, but instead as a reclamation of sorts that embraces an inherent multiplicity to their identities.

As we continue to dig, we see the way these materials are not just indicators of socioeconomic and racialized identities, but develop into agents of subjugation. National Anthem shows Stone’s hair combed and lovingly caressed by hands, an act of care familiar to many loving parent/child relationships. As the video progresses and the national anthem of the United States of America slowly fills the sonic background, flour is sprinkled into Stone’s hair and sprayed with water. A paste forms and is raked through the hair by the same hands that previously caressed them, their soft freedom transgressed. Where once were curls are now stone-like straight tresses; where once was rich brown is now pale white. Stone has been subjected to an act of literal white-washing and petrification in pursuit of monolithic assimilation. Her visage at the end of the film is eerily similar to a stoic bust of George Washington.

Free Water shows a photograph of manzanarez’s torso being slowly dipped into a tray of bleach as the sound of flowing water and crashing waves drone through the background. When bleach comes in contact with organic pigments, the chemical bonds of its chromophores–the molecular component responsible for color visibility–are broken in the oxidation process. The result is a substance transformed: a molecule that no longer carries perceptible color. In this performance of the baptism ritual, the corrosive chemical lifts and disintegrates the image of manzanarez’s body, leaving behind a ghostly trace of a body that once was, submerged in a pool of blood-like liquid. We have witnessed a parallel act of white-washing, enacted chemically with bleach rather than topically with flour.

These two works illustrate how a subjugator’s source of power is the ability to take that which gives identity or structure to a group and to use it against them–this is part of the historic model of settler colonialism, a model that has historically decimated and contemporarily continues to oppress the indigenous communities of both Mexico and what we refer to today as the United States of America. These materials that give contour to a specific portrait of racialized working class American life for Stone and manzanarez, when acted upon their bodies, suddenly give power to the subjugator in the transformation of their agential offering, a reminder of the tactics of settler colonialism. Objects of familiarity, symbols of comfort built upon the familial bond of trying to live the American dream become tools of assimilation into a larger culture that strips the body of their original identities in pursuit of “fitting in”–a forced performance of whiteness as majoritarian cultural logic ergo dominant law and standard, as Muñoz would refer to it.

Thus to dig a hole is a play of contradiction. The act itself is violent and destructive in its direct disruption of the land: the soil is invaded and displaced; the hole leaves behind a gaping wound, evidence of forcible removal and physical change.

But to see the work only as evidence of defeat would be incomplete in this reading of Stone’s and manzanarez’s work I have been offering. While the subjugation of their bodies by the forces of white-washing and racial heritage erasure are indeed illustrations of violence enacted against minoritarian subjects by the majoritarian sphere, the disidentificatory follow-up question thus becomes: how does one work through the history and lineage of this violence? In the context of Stone and manzanarez, how does one repair a dug hole? And what would or could it mean to do so?

One way to repair a dug hole is to put back the soil that was displaced to create it. The constituent elements remain the same, but the configuration is new and transformed–indeed affected by violence, but not necessarily in denial of it. An untitled piece in the corner of the gallery takes the once-oppressive, stereotype-conjuring materials of Fabuloso and empty Hot Cheeto bags and arranges them in an altar-like setting. White pillar candles–at once a representation of new beginnings as well as Catholic symbol of purity–burn atop an empty crate that once held oranges; the aroma of Fabuloso wafts through aromatic reeds that disperse its scent; Hot Cheeto bags sewn together into a floor mat create a place where one feels almost compelled to kneel and rest before a raised image of a dug hole. Stone and manzanarez offer a new, disidentificatory configuration of the materials that previously stereotype their heritage. In this altar–visually similar to an ofrenda, or an offering for loved ones lost–reclaim the materials in honor of those that have come before them, those that contributed to their heritage and identities they embody today.

Over time, as a dug hole is repaired and the soil is returned in its new configuration, it returns to its ecology from which it was originally formed. New life emerges eventually from the scarred site, working through but not forgetting the violence that was once enacted upon us. The opening reception of the exhibition saw Stone and manzanarez inviting visitors to toss yellow roses over an image of a dug hole–the same as that hung above the ofrenda–in a conceptual attempt to fill and cover it. Roses, often and continually pruned, grow through the violence enacted upon them, thriving and blossoming over and over again. A dug hole repaired embodies the contradiction of destruction and repair in its violence and reconfiguration.

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[1] José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown,” in The Sense of Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 11. Muñoz originally worked through the concept of disidentification in his first book, Disidentifications (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[2] Muñoz, 10.