Big Sur in Brooklyn: Video installation ‘Aragonite Stars’ brings underwater zen to BRIC

By Vittoria Benzine

Crystal waves crash and bubble across the room while sounds of water flood the senses. Soft blue light streams through repurposed industrial tarps covering the windows: These are the regenerative depths of Big Sur reimagined in BRIC House’s cavernous subterranean gallery.

Plunge into the Downtown institution’s 3,000 square-foot concrete space today and you will find “Aragonite Stars” by Los Angeles-based Suné Woods headlining BRIC’s latest exhibition cycle, alongside “The Smallest Unit Is Each Other” by Jonathan González and work on wood by Brooklyn-based Na’ye Perez called “What You Know Bout Love…”

This iteration of “Aragonite Stars” expands the artist’s ongoing multimedia project–five channels of film projected on walls and floors at once with an immersive soundtrack and atmospheric features. Aragonite is a common carbonate mineral found in hot springs, where Woods captured much of this footage. Her “stars” are a close-knit cast of performers who bring the 13-minute piece to life with amphibious interpretive dance and intimacy recorded underwater off the coasts of California and Hawaii, even the rivers of El Yunque. Their intuitive movements and eclectic costumes echo the fluid’s enigmatic nature. Water is the closest material representation we have for the way pure energy moves. Lumbering or loving through entropic currents, Woods’s subjects embody water’s range.

Courtesy Suné Woods & BRIC

“Aragonite Stars” originally debuted at the Hammer Museum in 2018 during the regional biennale MADE IN L.A. Really, Woods’s relationship with water began “in the womb, in the amniotic fluid,” she tells Brooklyn Magazine. It’s in her DNA, deeper than her Pisces placements. Woods dates the first appearance of water in her creative practice to 2015, a time where she also recalls a noticeable uptick in videos of racial violence circulating. “It was, for me, an active moment where I was going to the water to cleanse in the ocean as a heart opener,” Woods says.

Courtesy Suné Woods & BRIC

Woods expanded “Aragonite Stars” for its Brooklyn debut—her first NYC showcase—recording underwater scenes on an Olympus Tough and pairing them with footage from cameras she borrowed, even an iPhone. At this point the video stars 29 performers–mostly close friends, people who’ve crashed on her couch, her son. A few Woods met the same day they filmed. She also partnered with Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter and musician Meshell Ndegeocello, who helped craft an ambient new score atop the existing soundtrack Woods created in 2018 with Sophie Córdova and LaMont Hamilton.

“I was attempting to express the negation of emotion, to be in my body,” Ndegeocello tells Brooklyn Magazine. “To be human in water one must reverse their land instincts and return parts of themselves to [the] gestation state…I believe the ways of women and water are our most valuable resource.”

The installation examines water as a healing modality, inspired by Audre Lorde’s critical 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power,” which unpacks feminine energy’s potential and how contemporary culture stifles it. The erotic is just one facet of the sensual, Woods points out. We can also source sensuality from food, healing touch, hot springs and other holy places. In coping with continued violence across society, Woods calls “Aragonite Stars” a meditation. An offering. “It’s not necessarily in direct conversation with the violence that we’re very aware of being enacted upon us,” Woods says, “but it’s a way to heal and navigate this plane of existence.” She finds further connections in Octavia Butler, an American science fiction author whose work espouses interspecies connectedness through parasites and aliens alike.

Interconnectedness is more or less the prevailing theme across BRIC’s other offerings, too. In their project room, Jonathan González’s installation “The Small Unit Is Each Other” offers a surprisingly comfortable chair of the artist’s own design along with his collaborator Shannon Finnegan. There, viewers navigate a six-paneled switchboard on the floor, their feet flicking through six film channels including a melancholy cityscape with a wailing horn section and a manatee-led course on aquaponics. These disparate channels manage to build a cohesive universe, as the manatee notes–if the fish die, we all die.

Exploring González’s work

Na’ye Perez’s “What You Know About Love…,” named after a Pop Smoke song, seals the sentiment of diverse ecosystems by remixing acrylic and aerosol with Swisher Sweets wrappers and Coney Island sand. Every piece of the puzzle works because, not in spite, of each other.

“What You Know About Love…” (Photo by Vittoria Benzine)

“We think of ourselves as solid and we’re not,” Woods remarks. Human beings are a lot like water themselves—contained but messy. “Like ice cubes.” She’s curious to see what new life “Aragonite Stars” gains in Brooklyn—itself a big beach town steeled by concrete against the encroaching threat of storms. Sensuality as captured by “Aragonite Stars” offers a reprieve from the overbearing cityscape to help Brooklynites weather whatever lies ahead.

Come surprise blizzard or phantom heatwave, count on a healing escape from unpredictable NYC weather at BRIC House’s latest exhibition cycle through May 8. Reservations by staggered entry are recommended, and available here.