Dakota Mace's exhibition 'Dahodiyinii' at SITE Santa Fe represents the unrepresentable

SANTA FE — The greatest art is impossible to write about, because it surpasses human understanding. Dakota Mace’s solo exhibition “Dahodiyinii – Sacred Places” at SITE Santa Fe represents the unrepresentable.

Mace’s exhibition revisits the history of the Long Walk, during which the United States Army, in the 1860s, forcibly marched approximately 10,000 Diné (Navajo) to a prison camp at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. Adolf Hitler later studied the Bosque Redondo camp and used it as a model for his own concentration camps, according to the Jewish Journal.

With large scale installations that combine photosensitive chemicals and natural pigments, Mace takes her images to the edge of annihilation, symbolizing the violent displacement of her Diné ancestors and the desecration of their homeland.

“The disaster is what escapes the very possibility of experience — it is the limit of writing,” the philosopher Maurice Blanchot wrote in his book, “The Writing of the Disaster.” Blanchot grappled with the inadequacy of thought and language to comprehend the Holocaust, making his own language purposefully paradoxical, folding and crumbling in upon itself, to show how words fail in the face of abject horror.

In a similar way, Mace pushes photography to the very limits of legibility, most notably in her massive grid installation of hundreds of cyanotypes, which she made while retracing parts of the Long Walk. She placed photosensitive papers on the ground, allowing the wind to blow flowers and other natural debris onto them — “giving my ancestors and the land a chance to take a photograph,” as she described the process.

While some photogram artists, like Man Ray and Adam Fuss, used the medium to construct mysterious, dreamlike images, Mace’s photograms are more like fragments of documentary evidence. Their serial form suggests insistent, repeated attempts to catalog a landscape haunted by horror. Like the nuclear blast shadows of Hiroshima, Mace’s shadow forms give shape to that which has long disappeared.

The artist dyes her cyanotypes with red cochineal pigments, a technique which only adds to their eeriness. The cochineal may be sourced from nature, but the colors it produces are shockingly unnatural for what the images represent. Pale green plants become fiery magenta, as if viewed through the thermal imaging scope of a high-powered rifle. Combined with the military precision of the grid format itself, the violence of Mace’s colors suggests the lingering shadow of colonial violence in our urge, as museum-goers, to categorize and control meaning. We can see the landscape only as a flaming red solarized heat map, laid out across a regimented grid.

The philosopher Édouard Glissant believed that every culture had what he called “the right to opacity,” the right to resist being understood. Since colonizers often use knowledge systems as methods of control, one strategy for staying free is to remain unknowable, indecipherable, opaque.

Likewise, if we want to rid ourselves of old colonial habits of viewing and thinking, it’s useful to remember that we don’t always have to understand things in order to like them, or to appreciate them.

Mace uses the same cochineal and indigo pigments from her photograms to create large-scale murals that look like supernovas swirling with cosmic dust. These ambitious works have the experimental quality of Sam Gilliam’s monumental color field paintings and Kasper Sonne’s toxic reaction paintings, except Mace’s murals are made from organic materials with a long history in Diné art. In the context of this exhibition, the murals may represent violent obliteration, impassioned resistance to genocide or the sublime power of nature. They are explosive — full of beauty and horror, creation and destruction, all at once — and their meanings cannot be contained in words.

When making work about history, particularly such a heartbreaking history as the Long Walk, some artists will go the didactic route, bombarding their audience with names, dates and facts. Mace doesn’t do that. She leads with strong color and materiality, communicating the forceful urgency of her historical excavation visually. Once she gets our attention and makes us care, we can start filling in the details.

“Dahodiyinii” does include archival photographs, weavings, audio recordings of Diné elders and other fragments of collective memory, which add essential specificity and depth to the exhibition. For Diné audiences, there are probably subtle layers of meanings in these materials that are inaccessible to me, but part of Mace’s artistic brilliance is that she speaks to multiple audiences at once.

Even if I don’t understand every layer, I can still stand in awe of the exhibition’s emotive power. “Dahodiyinii” is a master class in how to make art about an unspeakable history while holding space for community and individual introspection.

Dakota Mace's exhibition 'Dahodiyinii' at SITE Santa Fe represents the unrepresentable