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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
By Mark Jenkins
September 8, 2025
IF A SMALL GALLERY IN ROCKVILLE is an odd place to mount a memorial to the West Indies workers who constructed the Panama Canal, that doesn’t make Jacqueline Arias’s “A Lived Experience” any less compelling. The show’s organizing principle is rope, evoking not just maritime labor but also tethers and the fibers of history and memory.
The Costa Rica-born and Arizona-based artist’s installation is “both an archive and altar,” according to her statement. It centers on a woven mound of thin rope strands that surround a small video monitor. The screen presents an AI-animated montage that includes a map of the canal area and pictures of a hand seen through water, as if literally submerged or symbolically half-remembered. The flickering images are accompanied by a roar that could be the sound of machinery or the ocean or both. It’s the enveloping sound as much as the historical theme that unifies the experience.
On the walls around the video screen are stereoscopic photo-collages of early-20th-century workers and testimonies that recall explosions and serious injuries. Also featured are coiled and knotted arrangements of rope, three of them with touches of red foam that imply blood, although the titles refer to “bile.” The effect is to suggest that the rope is an extension of the bodies that built the canal, each strand not just a tool but also a visual metaphor for human sinew. The laborers are gone but their effort remains, coiled into knots of remembrance.
Jaqueline Arias: A Lived Experience Through Sept. 28 at Common Ground Gallery, VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. www.visartscenter.org. 301.315.8200.
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