SITE 20 Years/20 Shows: SUMMER is the second in a yearlong series that series celebrates SITE’s dynamic exhibition history by reconnecting with artists who have exhibited with us over the years and inviting them to return to present new work. This summer, five SITE exhibiting artists return to SITE to present a new show, this time in partnership with a range of collaborators.

Janine Antoni

Then: In 1999 Janine Antoni’s performative sculpture and was featured in SITE Santa Fe’s Third International Biennial Looking for a Place, curated by Rosa Martinez. Antoni’s 2002 solo exhibition taught tether teeter was organized by SITE Santa Fe and presented a carefully selected overview of her work from 1993-2002.

Now: SITE presents Honey Baby, a collaboration between Antoni and the choreographer Stephen Petronio. This work is the second collaboration between Antoni and Pertronio, the first being Like Lazarus Did (2013), a dance and live art-installation. Honey Baby is a fourteen-minute video inspired by motion in utero, exploring the unique relationship between subject and host.

Amy Cutler

Then: In 2011 Janet Dees and Laura Steward organized a solo exhibition of Amy Cutler’s meticulously rendered paintings on paper that conjure unusual worlds predominantly inhabited by women. This exhibition traveled to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum University of California, Santa Barbara, where it was expanded by Elyse A. Gonzalez.

Now: Cutler collaborates with musician Emily Wells and hairdresser Adriana Papaleo to create an immersive and interactive installation inspired by the aesthetics of Cutler’s paintings. Viewers will feel as if they have stepped inside of one of Cutler’s compositions, and invited to partake in an interactive sound piece that reflects upon various aspects of “unburdening.”

Ann Hamilton

Then: In 1995, Ann Hamilton presented the video installation SALIC (1995) sited within a train car adjacent to SITE’s building. This work was a part of SITE SANTA FE’s First International Biennial: Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, curated by Bruce Ferguson.

Now: Hamilton presents the common SENSE · the animals (2014-2015), an installation which explores “touch” as the sense that is common to all animals species. Created from the artist’s extensive engagement with the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture’s Ornithology collection, for Hamilton, the work is “an address to the infinitude and threatened extinctions we share across species – a lacrimosa, and elegy for a future being lost.” It was commissioned by The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington and premiered in early 2015. SITE’s exhibition will only be the second time it is presented.

Hamilton has invited vocalists from the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Singers Program to serenade the congregation of animal images. They will be accompanied by Santa Fe Opera pianists. The dialog between animal images and musician can be interpreted as an elegy, a lament, a prayer, a meditation, a promise, or an oath.

These serenades will happen at 5:45 PM for seven Fridays during the run of the exhibition. Recordings of these performances will animate the space following the close of the opera season.

July 17: Kevin Thompson, bass; Michael Spassov, piano
July 24: Roy Hage, tenor; Francesco Milioto, piano
July 31: Shabnam Kalbasi, mezzo-soprano; Patrick Harvey, piano
August 7: Briana Hunter, mezzo-soprano; Glen Lewis, piano
August 14: Alyssa Martin, mezzo-soprano; Clinton Smith, piano
August 21: Andrea Nunez, soprano; Robert Tweten, piano
August 28: Adelaide Boedecker, soprano; Tatiana Vassilieva, piano

Harmony Hammond

Then: Harmony Hammond’s 2002 solo exhibition Monster Prints, focused on the artist’s monumental monotypes produced during a residency at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Now: Hammond and Francis Cape present Angle of Repose, a collaborative installation that is conceived as a conversation between Foreclosure, Cape’s trail of exiled hand-crafted furniture and Flesh Fold #1, Hammond’s large layered near-monochrome painting with it’s skin pulled back to reveal a rawness underneath that must be covered over with the poultice of paint. “Angle of repose“ is a term used by engineers to describe the steepest angle to which a material can be piled without collapsing. The works of sculptor Cape and painter Hammond reflect on the precarity—financial, political, social and emotional—of our lives.

Dario Robleto

Then: Dario Robleto’s poetic sculptures The Melancholic Refuses to Surrender (2003), Men Are the New Women(2002), and Deep Down I don’t Believe in Hymns (2001) were included in the 2012 exhibition More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness, curated by Elizabeth Armstrong and organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and SITE Santa Fe.

Now: Robleto presents an installation of works grounded in his collaborations with sound historian Patrick Feaster and Lance Ledbetter of Dust-to-Digital Records. Over the last several years, Robleto has been engaged in a extended inquiry into the history of the human heartbeat as sound. The exhibition at SITE will hone in on the connection between this work, Feaster’s pioneering techniques to “playback” visual records of the human heartbeat and pulse that pre-date Edison’s inventions, and Ledbetter’s work with early spirituals.

SITE 20/20 is complimented by archival material presented in the SITElab, featuring a rotating selection of video footage from performances and public programs, and photographic documentation of SITE’s exhibition history; this segment focuses on the period from 1999-2007.