May 21, 2026 | 6pm | at Tacoma Art Museum
The Nature of Things (93 min, 2015-2025)
This program considers the nature of material vis-à-vis the experiential, tracing forms of memory expressed in the sensual object. The body is posited as a site of mediation between the inanimate and the tactile. Sense perception is taken as a means of knowing the world, yet certain truths remain inscrutable, beyond what is present-at-hand. The contours of exile become inscribed in commonly neglected objects.
In Yuyan Wang’s portrait of a Chinese stone quarry, All Movements Should Kill the Wind, laborers sculpt material to reveal monuments in the making, as human and effigy forms become nearly indistinguishable amid the stone dust; honorary turns funerary. In the arid expanses of the Sharjah desert in the UAE, a lone Pakistani caretaker presides over the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis in Ali Cherri’s The Digger, embodying a solitary vigil against obsolescence. Liu Yujia’s Harvesting features the quiet yet arduous labor of a wood ear mushroom harvest in the Changbai Mountains among a group of local ethnic Korean women. Forgotten fruits are conjured by the literal handful from Caribbean citizens who form them from memory in Claudia Claremi’s The Memory of Fruits, itself hand-processed on 16mm film. In Dad’s Stick, by legendary British artist John Smith, the personal artifact is revealed in all of its historical ambiguity, its form an unsuspecting index unto a father-son relationship. Taiwanese-American Erica Sheu engages an aide-memoire through tactile gestures that link the memory of her grandmother to her current analog practice in Grandma’s Scissors. And James N. Kienitz Wilkins (This Action Lies) invites the viewer to consider the benevolence of banality: a static shot of styrofoam cup is filled with a monologue that segues from the solipsistic to the universal.
All Movements Should Kill the Wind
(2020, France/China, 12 min, digital file) Yuyan Wang
Men live in a stone quarry two hundred kilometers from Beijing, surrounded by rocks waiting to be cut, hacked, and sanded into sculptures. The same gestures are repeated over and over again, inscribing a history of deterioration and repair.
The Digger
(2015, Lebanon / UAE / France, 25 min, digital file) Ali Cherri
Shot in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates, The Digger follows the everyday life of Sultan Zeib Khan, the Pakistani caretaker who has been guarding the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis for twenty years. A witness to the nation’s founding mythologies, Sultan preserves archeological ruins, keeping them from falling into ruin. In the midst of these empty graves that echo the vastness of the desert, the absence of corpses is more unsettling than their presence.
Harvesting
(2023, China, 8 min, 16mm to digital file) Liu Yujia
The Changbai Mountain region is home to many cultivation sites dedicated to jelly ear fungus. The fungi are grown on the stumps made from crushed wood shavings. The harvesting season involves laborious work from the local ethnic Korean women pickers. In the autumn of 2022, the artist captured the essence of the fungus harvesting scene using black and white 16mm film. To protect themselves from the sun and mosquitoes, the workers are fully covered, silently toiling amidst the wafting smoke of mosquito coils.
“La memoria de las frutas”
(2025, Puerto Rico / 2021, Cuba, 9 min, 16mm to digital file) Claudia Claremi
The Memory of Fruits is a multimedia project that investigates the emotional and sensory bonds people maintain with fruits from the Caribbean. Through oral testimonies and hand-processed 16mm film, the work records gesturing hands that evoke mangoes, soursop, guava, and other fruits. By never showing the fruits themselves and instead centering the experience on touch and gesture, the project subverts traditional tropical imagery and questions botanical, colonial, and commercial forms of representation.
By evoking fruits longed for because of their absence in the present, or because they point directly to a specific place or moment in life, the project reflects on migration, industrial agriculture, and the loss of biodiversity. Developed across the region and its diasporas, it weaves a collective narrative that exposes the structural causes of cultural disconnection, while also celebrating fruits and the memories they hold.
Dad’s Stick
(2012, UK, 5 min, digital file) John Smith
Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father shortly before he died. Two of these were so steeped in history that their original forms and functions were almost completely obscured. The third object seemed to be instantly recognizable, but it turned out to be something else entirely. Focusing on these ambiguous artifacts and events relating to their history, Dad’s Stick creates a dialogue between abstraction and literal meaning. Looking back over half a century, the work explores the contradictions of memory to create an oblique portrait of “a perfectionist with a steady hand”.
Grandma’s Scissors
(2021, Taiwan/USA, 6 min, Super 8 to digital file) Erica Sheu
Is it a reconstruction of memory in the silence, or rather, notes before the memory disappears? The voice cannot be heard again, but one can still feel it through the eyes. The camera turns tactile into textile. The filmmaker connects with her grandma from her own craft to hers.
This Action Lies
(2018, US / Switzerland, 32 min, digital file) James N. Kienitz Wilkins
This Action Lies is about the limits of observation; about staring very hard at something while listening to something else. It is a paranoid polyphonic apology of a simple act: offering three perspectives on an object that may not exist in a room that cannot exist, while at the mercy of an unreliable monologue.
Elements: Material and Process in the Moving Image is a six-part film series, presenting twenty-five works from contemporary artists, and conceived in dialogue with the exhibition HAUNTED.
Curated by David Dinnell and Jay Kuehner
Focusing on matter that spans both natural and artificial realms – and its transformation through manual, mechanical, and organic processes – the works in this series undertake an accounting of the lived world. Taken in context with the TAM exhibition HAUNTED, these selected works collectively consider how the experiential is framed through empirical and intuitive means, with moving images acting as witness, catalyst, surrogate, and archive. Manifest in extractive and generative forms, destructive and productive acts, durable to ephemeral ends, the processual – as cinematic event – reveals latent histories in granular form but of ever-increasing consequence. Featuring 25 works that scale from deeply personal to broadly historical, from geologic to anthropogenic; fusing the merely observational to the sheerly operational image.