Clarissa Tossin

Much of Tossin’s most recent work examines the origins and impacts of the climate crisis, increasingly through the lens of 21st century space exploration. These works connect plans for mining and settlement of the Moon and Mars with terrestrial legacies of resource extraction, colonialism, and environmental degradation on Earth. According to curator Sandrine Wymann, “Tossin contemplates the day, not far off, when we exhaust this planet’s resources and flee to Mars to begin anew, as an extra-terrestrial civilization with no choice but to continue elsewhere or perish.”[10]

The suspended, double-sided circular weavings in A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky) (2019) interlace satellite views of the Amazon River and 2019 fires in Amazônia with NASA images of the great Martian plain Amazonis Planitia and the Milky Way, comprising woven patterns that resemble agricultural land partitions viewed from space. Similarly, Tossin’s Future Geography (2021) weavings combine strips of Amazon.com delivery boxes with NASA images of Shackleton Crater on the Moon (proposed site of the first US lunar ice mining facility), Jezero Crater on Mars (landing site of NASA's Perseverance rover), and the Hyades star cluster (the nearest to the solar system), highlighting the intersection of scientific and commercial interests in space exploration.[11]

The 8th Continent (2021), a triptych of large-scale jacquard tapestries commissioned by Rice University, represents the culmination of Tossin’s interest in science and commerce converging in outer space. Working with Rice’s Space Institute and Houston’s Lunar and Planetary Institute, Tossin sourced NASA images surveying the Moon’s permanently shadowed polar craters for concentrations of water ice, to be mined for use in making hydrogen fuel for deep space ventures, including NASA’s proposed Artemis missions. Mapmaking has long been used to establish and project territorial sovereignty, and NASA’s surveys of lunar resources are no exception. Harking back to the gilt and silk threaded tapestries of the medieval and Renaissance periods, Tossin recontextualizes these images within a regal tradition of showcasing sovereign wealth and power; metallic gold threading indicates likely stores of lunar ice—the gold of the future.[12]

Death by Heat Wave (Acer pseudoplatanus, Mulhouse Forest) (2021) ponders the demise of all life in the death of a single tree. A silicone cast of a decomposing Sycamore from the Mulhouse forest signals the mass die-off of Sycamores across the region due to rising temperatures, while measuring the pace of human activity against much slower natural cycles of decay and regeneration. Another work, Rising Temperature Casualty (Prunus persica, home garden, Los Angeles) (2021), features a silicone cast of a peach tree from Tossin’s garden in Los Angeles. Taken together, they register both the global reach of climate change and the similarity of its effects for disparate species in widely separated places. Vulnerably Human (2022), a silicone-based skin-shed cast of an astronaut suit incorporating meteorite powder, tree bark, and soil, evokes the precarious next stage of human civilization, bridging the vulnerability of human bodies in space with the fragility of life on Earth. [13][14][15]

Another important focus in Tossin's recent work involves 1920s Mayan Revival architecture, which co-opted the architecture and iconography of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

The single-channel video Ch’u Mayaa draws out the suppressed influence of Maya architecture on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (1919-1921), foregrounding the building’s Indigenous symbology through a dance performance by Crystal Sepúlveda based on gestures and postures found in ancient Maya ceramics and murals, thus reclaiming the building to the Maya architectural lineage.[16][17] A series of sculptures based on the Mayan Theater (1927), a landmark movie palace in Los Angeles, form the basis of Tossin's installation The Mayan (2017). The theater's interior design by Francisco Cornejo directly appropriates motifs found in several Maya sites: Quiriguá and Piedras Negras in Guatemala, and Yaxchilán in Mexico. Tossin exposes this mimicry with skin-like silicone imprints of the reliefs that decorate the theater’s doors and walls, combined with plaster casts of hands and feet sourced from the archeological sites, and bits of faux jaguar fur, quetzal feather, and serpent skin.[18][19][20][21]

Tossin's collaborative film Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing (2022) presents an immersive sensory journey across languages, music, and architectural spaces that are variously imagined and real, cosmological and colonized. Commissioned by EMPAC, the work centers on Maya cultural artifacts, wind instruments in particular, and their capacity to voice alternative modes of knowledge. The film's narrative follows the personal histories of its Maya protagonists, including K’iche’-Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez, Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal (who appears inside the Mayan Revival Sowden House in Los Angeles), and Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta, featuring music and sound design by Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães and cinematography by Jeremy Glaholt.[22][23][24]

As art historian Susanna Phillips Newbury observes:

“Whether reinserting figurative traditions and ritual practices of Mayan motifs in early twentieth-century Los Angeles architecture, as in her 2017 video Ch’u Mayaa, or more broadly examining a grotesque, postlapsarian world, [Tossin] employs the future perfect language of speculative science to propose ways of seeing our devastated present.”[25]