Christine Howard Sandoval creates videos, objects, installations, and largescale drawings that resist the constraints of representation, access, and habitation. Her works draw from her own culture and heritage, as well as her experiences of entropic landscapes and their transformations through the act of mapping, invoking what is physically present and the memory of what is no longer there. The new works created for SMB12 are the latest in Howard Sandoval’s series of tactile drawings that thematize the typology of Spanish mission architecture and propose the mission itself as a living archive and a site of Indigenous futurism. To this end, she frequently employs adobe (a live materialmade from clay, sand, and soil traditionally used to build structures in desert environments) as a medium linking land and forms of inhabitation, with its brittle materiality challenging the colonial narratives of her ancestral homeland in Alta California. After collecting soil samples in SeMA Nanji Art Residency in Seoul, she incorporated them into her drawings, amplifying their unique formal properties and acknowledging Korea’s vibrant microecologies of clayand related ceramic practices. Touching on various employments of the arcade form, iconic to the mission and also 20th Century Modern architectures, the artist links this passageway through multiple moments in time, the mideighteenth century in the Americas, the midnineteenth century in France, and today with the unmooring of colonial monuments from their place in public spaces.
