Escape to Dragonfly Island
Over the course of a decade, Jessica Briceño Cisneros' artistic practice has investigated, mainly through sculpture, the material reality of the built environment and the economic and ideological context inscribed in Latin American modernism. Working first hand with construction materials and their processes, which are usually heavy and rigid, the artist interweaves and evokes the resource of poetry and the concept of imbalance, both being narrative axes in her sculptures.
Dragonfly Island shows a body of work that Briceño Cisneros produced during a residency in Skowhegan, Maine, in the summer of 2019. This 75-year-old school of painting and sculpture in the United States brings together about 65 artists from around the world from June to August to work in a location surrounded by acres of forest next to a lake. Faced with these idyllic conditions for creativity, the artist nevertheless felt cloistered. As a personal healing strategy, Briceño Cisneros built a floating sculpture, an artificial island in the lake that would allow her to escape from this feeling of confinement and thus have a personal space.
Upon entering the gallery, 6AM (2021) is presented: a group of 6 photographs documenting the artist swimming towards her sculpture. This action, captured chronologically, shows her arrival at the island and how she climbs onto it, balancing herself, to finally see how she rests and stretches at the top. These actions begin to reveal that there is a purpose of self care and healing both bodily, mentally, as well as spiritually.
The second room of the gallery presents Dragonfly Island (2021), a two-channel video which documented the activation of the sculpture at two different times of the day. The first is in the morning and with the artist arriving at the island alone. As if it were the first encounter or colonization of the island, the artist raises a flag to proclaim it as a personal territory. The second video was made with a drone camera in the afternoon, in full summer sun, and shows the artist with two other companions and fellow residents. To visit the island it was necessary to have a previous agreement between the visitors, as it could only accommodate up to four people. The participants had to take care of the balance of the raft in order not to overturn and to live together peacefully. It was necessary to have a pact of trust where the priority was the welfare of the community.
The island also has a structure that serves as a drum or echo chamber, which allows for voice reverberation and adds a sonic dimension to the island. In both videos, the recorded sound is intermingled: the songs of birds, the flight of the dragonfly, the splash of the dives, the light swell of the lake, a laugh, a duck. It also reverberates and reflects the light on the waves of the lake at different times, which are moments of contemplation of the aquatic landscape. For the show, Briceño Cisneros has created a new element to share the imbalance and instability to watch the videos. When sitting on the bench you have to negotiate the weight of other bodies as well as your own body weight over the length of the bench. This offers a relationship where there is no direct contact and again there is an agreement of trust, which suggests that when instability is shared a connection is created both physically and emotionally. Finally, on the floor is a group of small revisions of the models Jessica made as studies for Dragonfly Island. These sculptures refer to symbols, letters or numbers. Being presented on the floor as a scaled archipelago they act as a possible floating poetry or language in a state of fluidity, displaced from their territories of origin.
In a similar way, Jessica's methodology, which has investigated Latin American architecture and its materiality, is displaced and reconstructed, to now apply it to the material reality of the northern hemisphere. In this project the landscape of the United States and its architectures are protagonists: the prefabricated lightness of the constructive materials that Jessica found there, modular and synthetic, which serve as thermal and sound insulators and function as flotation elements. Likewise, the surrounding constructions, particularly the silos and barns, which are hollow, voluminous and light, directly informed the manufacture of Libélula Island.
By presenting this body of work in Mexico City - the capital of a liminal country between south and north, in a territory that was once a lake with an island at its center, with volcanoes in the landscape and frequent seismic movements - it is placed within a larger framework, in a sort of echo chamber that amplifies the decisions Jessica made in her research.

Ana Castella
October 2021