Jennifer Zackin

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Jennifer Zackin, Killamanta Kutimusaq (To the Moon and Back ), which will be at the Museum from January 22 to June 18, 2006. The exhibition's opening reception will be held on Sunday, January 22, from 3 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation from New York City is available; please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

Those who saw Zackin's Katonah and Socrates Sculpture Garden tree-wrapping installations will learn more about the ideas behind her work with this exhibition. Since the late 1990s, the intersection of ritual and ceremony with textile craft traditions has been the basis for Zackin's work. A meeting in the United States with a Peruvian ceremonialist led the artist 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.

Zackin's Aldrich exhibition, Killamanta Kutimusaq, which will include sculpture, collage, and video, weaves together an intuitive response to Q'ero tradition with a documentary approach. Works in the exhibition include 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 , is a freestanding sculpture that resembles 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. Constructed of high-tech, metallic fabric printed with digital patterns, it incorporates a multi-layered sound track of recordings that Zackin made of Q'ero song.

Killamanta Kutimusaq comes from the Quechua language, a language derived from Incan. Meaning, "To the Moon and Back," the title suggests 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.

Zackin has exhibited her work widely, including the recent exhibitions Set and Drift (2005) , organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at Governor's Island in New York, Factory Direct (2005), at Artspace, New Haven, CT, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2004 she exhibited at Alianza Francesa, Lima, Peru, and ICPUA in Cusco, Peru. Zackin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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Jennifer Zackin: Killamanta Kutimusaq (To the Moon and Back)