Selva Aparicio at the DePaul Museum
Curated by Ionit Behar, Summer 2024

A large rose window, reproduced in the style of the one at the Cathedral of Santa Maria de Pi, meets viewers at the outset of Selva Aparico’s In Memory Of at the DePaul Museum in Chicago. We learn the stained glass window that faces the Plaça del Pi, in the artist's native Barcelona, has fallen three times throughout the years. Aparicio’s rendition, installed for a more intimate and earth-bound viewing, replaces the stained glass with discarded lettuce leaves from Chicago’s produce markets, illuminating their delicate venation through the iron Gothic tracery. We learn the artist's first mentor, whose studio sat across from the cathedral, was also a pederast. 

In a small alcove built for the exhibition, sits a memorial bench in an obsolete style, donated by the Chicago Park District and featuring a bronze plaque reading ‘In Memory Of.’  The bench sits opposite a small window to the exhibition, and is partially obscured by glass window bars we learn are made from a frottage of the ones on the artist's childhood home. Through the transparent glass we contour the both proximate and opaque remainders of Aparicio’s poetic memory-work. I would return later to the memorial bench to sit with the haunting, receding images contained within, and also recall that glass is a slow moving liquid. 

In the following gallery, directly into the oak floor, Aparicio painstakingly carved an intricate area rug from her childhood. She frames the practice as both a therapeutic procedure and an obsessive remembering, with allusions to Freudian psychoanalysis. Across the gallery, an upright piano exposes a tangle of wasps nests in its interior. The artist's beloved family cat, taxidermied, sits atop, facing a wall of prosthetic ears made in the shape of the pair that were surgically removed at the end of the creature's life. The ears are formed with found organic materials, lightly assembled, beautiful in their arrangement, and evoking an awareness of manifold ecological attunement. A rich, omnidirectional, more-than-human polyphony of sensing, meanings, impressions and exchange. 

In Memory Of, overwhelms its anthropogenic objects and affects, producing a feeling of deep time and reanimation of the undead—that enormous swath of everything consigned to the disenchanted by Modernity. Aparicio’s poetic, forensic scenography of troubled domestic relationships coarticulated with thoughtfully assembled organic materials, recalibrates human exceptionalism, and occasions a posthuman atmospherics of transformative hauntings, coursing with undercurrents of violence, menace, paradox and intricate beauty. 

Solace, a wooden rocking chair, draped in a crocheted blanket, and bristling with collected honey locust thorns, suggests a mutability of forms and the impossibility of a true and enduring comfort. The nearby Velo de luto arranges thousands of cicada wings into the shape of a mourning veil, woven together with three generations of women's hair from the artist's family. 

Sitting on the bench, my spine resting on In Memory Of, I recall a passage in Ben Lerner’s poem The Media. ‘… if you’ve ever seen a dendritic pattern in a frozen pond, lightning captured in hard plastic, or the delicate venation of an insect’s wing (the fourth vein of the wing is called the media), then you’ve probably felt that a spirit is at work in the world, or was, and that making it visible is the artist’s task, or was.’