A site-responsive, outdoor installation pairing custom benches with sculptures, sounds, and text to create a meandering path within the landscape of Sweet Pass Sculpture Park. Craving touch and intimacy, Desire Paths attends to the tactile and topographical body of the landscape. Lengths of brightly colored ropes weave through the park, tracing a simple line drawing across lush green fauna and inviting visitors to mirror, or playfully subvert, its direction. Planted along this route are an edition of six custom benches, acting as islands, nodes, or way stations— individual stars within a larger constellation.

Navigation and wayfinding are necessarily contextual - one’s position can only be defined in relation to other objects and environmental cues. Accordingly, the works in this exhibition are repositories for sensory information distilled from the environment of the park. Perhaps in reaction to the all-digital regime of the pandemic, these sculptures reference decidedly more ancient technologies along with the classical natural elements that were thought to animate them - sun, wind, earth, water, and aether. Cameron’s sundials track the movement of the sun’s path across adorned surfaces. Rachael’s softly wavy, porous umbrella translates changing light into a shady caress. Hilliary’s sail-like sunshade reflects brightness, while allowing itself to be whipped into motion by the prevailing wind. Claire’s anthropomorphic windsock turns a business suit into conduit for the whims of the breeze. Gracelee’s ear-shaped well listens attentively only to collect the morning dew. Devra’s memorial bench provides a place in the aether to absorb the feelings and contemplate intangibility. An accompanying audio piece, made in collaboration with musician Ben Seretan, offers brief portals to new places and marks the passage of time with swells of sound, allowing the viewer an alternate method to orient themselves in time, as well as space.

In proximity to each bench, visitors will find a small mirror engraved with an enigmatic symbol. These plaques tie the artworks to words and images found in a correlating zine, co-authored by the collective.

Material Girls are a non-hierachical, feminist collective from NY, Austin and LA. Core members include Cameron Cameron, Claire Lachow, Devra Freelander, Gracelee Lawrence, Rachael Starbuck, and Hilliary Gabryel.

SP2 presents two video works by Claudia Bitran; Falling (2018) and a new trailer for A Deep Emotion, Bitran’s frame for frame remake of James Cameron’s Titanic. As part of a Sweet Pass sponsored workshop in Dallas this spring, Bitran worked with local artists and students to help complete her film. Portions of this footage will be included in her trailer also on view from May 29 - July 31, 2021.

From graphite animations to handmade movie props, these video works re-render moments of collapse using the kinetic energy of failure to harness a familiar digital vertigo. As a cardboard Titanic sinks, a figure falls from a chair and a ladybug tumbles off the page - each moment simultaneously tragic, comedic, and relatable.