Christine Howard Sandoval: A wall is a shadow on the land

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Christine Howard Sandoval, '"Archival—for Rosario Cooper and my 10 year old self," 2020

collage (detail)

In a meditation on land, language and architecture, Vancouver-based Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic artist Christine Howard Sandoval re-considers the insidious meaning-making power of the archive in her solo exhibition A wall is a shadow on the land. Through the use of adobe, a desert building material made from clay, sand, and soil and deeply connected to her own family’s histories and practices, Howard Sandoval considers how land is and has been inhabited, the stories embedded in it, and the potential futures it holds.

Howard Sandoval reconfigures the typology of Spanish mission architecture in a series of new adobe sculptures and large-scale drawings. Brought together with archival documents and the artist’s own fourth-grade school report on the California missions, she works to dislodge the deep-rooted colonial fictions that narrate the histories of her ancestral homeland in Northern California. A wall is a shadow on the land points to the ways in which narratives of colonial erasure are rehearsed within the public school system, and how the ongoing physical presence of mission sites on unceded Indigenous land in the western US are markers of the systemic proliferation of the imperial project and its persistent conditions today.

Co-curated by Julia Lamare and Kimberly Phillips

This exhibition is generously supported by the Audain Foundation. Howard Sandoval’s installation Archival—for Rosario Cooper and my 10 year old self off-site at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival.