Clarissa Tossin A Queda do Céu / The Falling Sky

Focus, March 26, 2024

The suspended tryptich A queda do céu (The Falling Sky), interlaces satellite images of the 2019 fires in the Amazon rainforest with Nasa images of the Mars region named after the rainforest (Amazonis Planitia), the Amazon River (Rio Amazonas) and the Milky Way. Titled after Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa’s autoethnography, Tossin’s The Falling Sky collides two Amazons, one on Earth and one on Mars, denouncing their vulnerability as present and future exploration targets. The works woven patterns suggest the partitioning of land by agribusiness when viewed from above.

For the last fifteen years, Brazilian-born, Los Angeles-based Clarissa Tossin (b.1973) has engaged with both built and natural environments of extractive economies using installation, video, sculpture, and weavings; studying how cultural differences resist, or are transformed, through exchanges at a local and global level. Her latest body of work engages with the private sector involvement in the 21st Century space exploration, as unprecedented pressure on our planet’s resources has turned the extractivist gaze beyond the Earth.

The Falling Sky has been previously exhibited at Falling from Earth, solo show, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Denver, Colorado, USA, 2022; Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion, solo show, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France, 2021, and Dhaka Art Summit: Seismic Movements, Bangladesh. Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation, 2020.

Tossin’s work is present in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; MFA Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Seattle Art Museum; MSU Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan University; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; USA; Casa Niemeyer, Universidade de Brasília; and Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; as well as numerous private collections in Brazil, the Americas, Europe and Asia.

This year’s Whitney Biennial, which just opened to the public, features a new installation by Clarissa Tossin.

*A Queda do Céu / The Falling Sky*, 2019. All images courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City. copyright the artist, photo: Paul Salveson.