Salón Silicón presents the first solo exhibition in Mexico City by Brooklyn-based artist Alva Mooses. Medida del Mar features the artist’s recent works, which have developed in material, conceptual, and affective ways. The exhibition includes aluminum cutouts, textiles, prints, ceramics, and a sound installation resulting from investigations developed over several years. Mooses’ imagery originates from a terrestrial globe model cast in clay in which the arc, base, and knobs traversing the axis are reconfigured. Through broken structures, Mooses generates a series of symbols that, although asemic, highlight the possibility of new constructions, languages, and ways of measuring the world. The artist explores wringing, draining, and spinning––rethinking world-measuring devices while tracing formal and affective threads between body and earth.

The evocations from a collapsed earth have political, social, and environmental connotations. Simultaneously, they subvert the lines and borders imposed by a colonizing and imperial desire. In Medida del Mar (2024), a textile piece from which the exhibition title stems, linen is dyed with Indigo over Cochineal, two pigments entangled in histories of colonization. Mooses recovers the shape of the globe as seen unfolded in a map projection. She uses the weight and creases of the linen fabric to evoke skin or body parts, such as breasts or pregnant bellies, while summoning bodies of water. Mooses reflects on her experience of becoming a mother in this work: the idea of making a world in one’s body, and the dramatic transformation of the body during pregnancy and birth.

In Anclas (2024), a hand-sculpted ceramic corn form upholds an unbound necklace chain, recalling a nautical rode and a navel string. This work further honors maternidad, which for the artist includes reproductive autonomy. In Hélice (2017), a monoprint series comprised of mirrored arcs stenciled with raw blue pigments, multiple configurations suggest bodies of water that are echoed elsewhere in the exhibition. In another exploration of indigo on fabric, Lóbulos (2024), Mooses displays multiple silk drapes with varying intensities of indigo dye that take their form from the petals or gores of unfolded globe diagrams. The stretched forms in Lóbulos become tongues in the artists’ lexicon while reminiscing ancient earthly forms such as stalactites. The installation alludes to the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, who wrote, “I will have my serpent’s tongue–my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.” (Anzaldua, 59) Mooses offers an array of indigo tones, signaling the material’s vast cultural, political, and spiritual lineages.

The blue tones of Lóbulos are reinterpreted acoustically in Pulso Telúrico (2024), a three-channel looped sound piece inspired by the sounds of water in which the tapping of stones, the flapping of fabric, and a violin act as percussive instruments evoking breath, wind, waves, and forms of labor. This sound installation, a collaborative work created with Ukiah Mooses, the artist’s sister, is an ongoing dialogue that further evokes a cyclical nature.

Mooses brings together a new visual vocabulary in Turtle Face and the Last Drop (2024), rendered in pounded aluminum cutouts. The wall installation includes sections of the deconstructed globe stand and references to animal and human narratives that call to mind representations of prehistoric clay artifacts that include water and milk containers. The twisted globe stand imagery reappears in Medidas (2023), a series of etchings that consider the embedded history of colonial mapping in Western printmaking.

By engaging with distinct materials, symbologies, and pictorial languages, Mooses creates a world of poetics guided by material and chemical processes that vindicate the natural world against an imposed cartographic system. Medida del Mar encourages viewers to orient their attention to texture, surface, and tone, in a language that affirms the body and the earth as interrelated beings.