Clarissa Tossin: to take root among the stars

The Frye Art Museum presents the first solo museum exhibition on the US West Coast of Brazilian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Clarissa Tossin. Featuring several new weavings and drawings commissioned by the Frye, the exhibition brings together works across media from the last decade of Tossin’s practice to explore the intersections of climate change and global capitalism’s insatiable search for new frontiers.

Tossin’s new works explore mapping and naming as colonial technologies of discovery and conquest on Earth and beyond, as she envisions how our current ecologically disastrous cycles of human consumption will manifest in twenty-first-century space exploration. The series Future Geography (2021–ongoing) focuses on sites in space that are targeted for future resource extraction. Through a technique that recalls Amazonian weaving traditions, Tossin interlaces reproductions of satellite images with strips of Amazon.com delivery boxes. Cosmic Cliffs (2023), a piece created for the exhibition, incorporates images of star and galaxy clusters captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and published in July of 2022.   

Another new commission, Maritime Arrivals (2023), uses the visual language of fifteenth-century nautical maps to draw sites from the moon on recycled Amazon.com delivery envelopes. 

The exhibition also presents the artist’s 2022 monumental film Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing. The title, translated into Mayan K’iche’, Spanish, and English, is borrowed from a poem by one of the film’s protagonists. Tossin shot much of the film at the Sowden House and the Mayan Theater—two of Los Angeles’s Mayan Revivalist landmarks—where her collaborators animate the structures with ritual, reclaiming connections to lineages beyond the modernist tradition. 

to take root among the stars borrows its title from science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels, in which humans seek to survive amid ecological and cultural apocalypse. Throughout the exhibition, Tossin troubles capitalism’s unwavering faith in progress and instead seeks networks of interconnectedness across time and geographies. These works of wide-ranging forms embody the tension between capitalist-driven environmental destruction and reciprocal caretaking approaches of Indigenous communities. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph of Tossin’s work, which features full-color illustrations and essays by Vic Brooks, Leslie Dick, and Georgia Erger.  

Clarissa Tossin (born 1973, Porto Alegre, Brazil) has presented solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2022); Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston (2021); La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2021); Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA (2019); and Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2018). She is the recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant (2020); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2019); Fellows of Contemporary Art Grant (2019); Artadia Award (2018); and Juméx Foundation Research Grant (2018), among others. Tossin’s work is included in US and Brazilian public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; Casa Niemeyer, Universidade de Brasília; and the Instituto Inhotim Collection, Brumadinho, Brazil.  She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, and a BFA from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo. 

Clarissa Tossin: to take root among the stars is organized by Georgia Erger, Associate Curator. Generous support provided by the Frye Foundation and Frye Members. Media sponsorship is provided by Encore Media Group. 

Also on view
Rafael Soldi: Soft Boy
October 7, 2023–January 7, 2024

Antonio M. Gómez: LINEAJES
November 11, 2023–March 10, 2024

Hanako O’Leary: Izanami
November 11, 2023–March 10, 2024

Frye Salon
November 11, 2023–October 27, 2024