Arts

This article analyzes the symbolism of the phytomorphic motif of the mountain vine in the traditional embroidery of Cuetzalan, made by the Nahua women of the Masehual Siuamej Mosenyolchicauani collective. From the iconological approach, the pre-iconographic, iconographic and iconological levels of the motif will be examined, with the support of ethnography. The study identifies that the vine, a recurring plant element in traditional blouses, not only fulfills an ornamental function, but also constitutes a symbol of vital continuity, union and regeneration. Its visual representation alludes to the movement of life and the relationship between the natural and spiritual planes within the Nahua worldview. Through embroidery, the artisans express their connection to the land and the transmission of ancestral textile knowledge, reaffirming their cultural identity in a community context.

Experimental prints made by Jackson Pollock in Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in 1944–45 were crucial to the evolution of his modernist style, an evolution quite different from Clement Greenberg’s conception of it. Hayter said “Pollock always claimed that he had two masters, Benton and me.” Following Charles Darwent’s Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism 2023 and Christina Weyl’s The Women of Atelier 17 2019, this article examines a 1944–45 engraving in which Pollock inscribed the letters A, R, T. This examination reveals the experimental techniques and the gendered themes that shaped Pollock’s continued exploration of his art as erotic dialogue. Absorbing Hayter’s technical understanding of the three-dimensionality of an engraved line as it produced and moved through “the space of the imagination,” Pollock succeeded in mediating between male and female tensions, stated in underlying imagery, as he began in ‘ART’ to generate his abstract and unifying all-over linear webs, culminating in such works as Autumn Rhythm 1950.

This article explores the media practices of the Karrabing Film Collective through the lens of a materialist model of (colonial, ecological, and digital) unconscious, reconceived as a dynamic interplay of repression, expression, compression, and distension. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s reworking of Freudian operations and Elizabeth Povinelli’s critique of late liberal geontopower, the paper analyzes how Karrabing’s improvisational realism and aesthetic strategies—particularly their use of smartphone filmmaking and digital superimposition—navigate and resist the structural pressures of settler governance. The article equally focuses on their augmented reality archive project, Mapping the Ancestral Present, as a potent example of how digital compression can be refunctioned to enact distension across space and time. Situating the unconscious not only in the psychic or symbolic but also in the infrastructural and technological, the article argues that Karrabing’s practice maps a politics of survivance in the “cramped space” of settler modernity.