Artist Delcy Morelos is developing a new commission for Dia Chelsea that takes soil, territory, and topography as its points of departure. For her installations, the artist will coat the surfaces of one gallery with dirt and construct a landscape of stacked, earthen objects in the other. Morelos’s practice considers the dependencies between natural and built environments through the framework of Indigenous relations to land. In these works, material accumulation and monochromatic expanse collapse distinctions between volume and surface, interiority and exteriority. Since 2012 Morelos has been interested in the cosmologies of ancestral Andean and Amazonian cultures, her own and others, focusing particularly on the sustaining powers of water and clay in these origin stories. Her immersive installations aim to cultivate moments of connection with what she describes as the “intimate humidity of the earth.”

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