Our River Flowing From Our Eyes
2024
Hand-blown glass vessels, casted glass sculptures, Colorado River water, excelsior, painting
Breck Create, Breckenridge, CO
“When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping, is how you might translate it. Or, a river of grief.
…We carry the river, its body of water, in our body.”
- Excerpt from The First Water is The Body by Natalie Diaz
This exhibition Our river flowing from our eyes brings together the vision of artists and friends Camille Hoffman and Gyun Hur in an immersive meditation on landscape. Hoffman and Hur honor water and body as powerful elements in personal and collective grief and imagination. Their practices of site-specific installation and local collaboration explore the interwoven relationship between humans and nature toward repair, both physical and emotional. Inspired by the poem The First Water is The Body by Mojave American poet and educator Natalie Diaz, Hoffman and Hur draw upon their respective diasporic narratives to critically interrogate and reimagine the meaning of the American dream — a construct formed on the premise of violent displacement and erasure of Indigenous people and land, among many others.