Elemental Currents—Material, Memory, and Myth

Ballroom Marfa is proud to present Elemental Currents—Material, Memory, and Myth, a group exhibition featuring the work of Christopher Blay, Laddie John Dill, and Virginia L. Montgomery. Through a diverse range of media—including sand, foam, neon and photography—the exhibition offers immersive expressions of the convergence of human relationships, technology, the landscape, and imagined futures.

Christopher Blay (b. 1967) is an artist, curator, and writer. He is currently the Director of Public Programs at the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and formerly Chief Curator of the Houston Museum of African American Culture [2021 - 2024]. His work is in dialogue with the African Diasporic experience historically, presently, and a platform for radical imagination in building black futures. As he states, “I build sculptures that combine the past and the future, create cyanotypes, both as a way to mark the present with the light of the living sun, and as a metaphor for blueprints towards black futures.” For Ballroom, Blay has constructed a multi-media, three-dimensional SpLaVCe Ship that stems from his question: “What would result if you merged a space ship with a slave ship? Where would it go? What would happen when it gets there, and who are the inhabitants?” He will also be exhibiting cyanotypes from his Diaspronauts series that are a part of his investigations of the intersection of Afro-futurism, space exploration, and legacies of the African Diaspora in contemporary imagining.

Laddie John Dill (b. 1943), a Los Angeles artist, is one of the leading light and space artists in the country. Dill had his first solo exhibition in New York City with Illeanna Sonnabend Gallery in 1971 and was one of the first Los Angeles artists to exhibit “light and space” work in New York. Dill has been crafting light and earthly materials like concrete, glass, sand, and metal into luminous sculptures, wall pieces, and installations since the 1970s. Dill’s fascination with luminosity has persisted over this fifty-year career, and he continues to experiment with the material and immaterial properties of light in paintings, sculptures, architectural installations and outdoor laser light shows. It is the artist’s ever-curious outlook with the medium itself that has enabled him to create a uniquely beautiful and profound body of work.

At Ballroom, Dill will combine Texas desert sand with elements of neon light as part of his Silica Lightscape Series. The work is inspired by the site, as Dill uses local sand with embedded light structures to create immersive installations that respond to the desert landscape, connote geological time and foreground the energy transfer through light.

Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) (b. 1986) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker and metaphysical multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. VLM is known for her surreal, synesthesia-esque artworks which unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own neurodivergent world. Her artworks are sensorial and symbolic. VLM's artistic efforts are characterized by material experimentation, somatic sensitivity, and her unusual studio practice of hand-raising the moths and butterflies appearing in her works. Her works shift in subject matter between moths to stones and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via narratives of destruction, rebirth, and metamorphosis.

At the heart of Elemental Currents is the intersection of art and science, engagement with the natural world, and an emphasis on the role of technology and industrial materials within the experience of environmental phenomena. The artists employ the physical properties of materials like sand, foam, and light to examine natural and cultural forces, including historical atrocities, to fantasize about change, renewal, and imagined futures. This aspirational exhibition considers the future as a place for positive change while keeping a watchful eye on the past and present.