"Siera Hyte’s exhibition, Honey Week, features work that implies an audience both human and animal," writes UT Art History masters candidate Grace Sparapani in the catalog essay for MFA candidate Siera Hyte's latest exhibition at Cordova gallery in Barcelona. "Hyte’s practice is based in sculpture and performance; though these media usually include reference to a human scale or form, the work in Honey Week alludes to human and non-human bodies alike."
Hyte took inspiration from Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell (1920) for the work in the exhibition. Sparapani draws attention to how the three pieces in the exhibition create an installation that "confuses the gallery and the space outside of it." The floor is covered in clay for I change with your weather (2018) and Taste of red (2017) is constructed of fruit, flowers, and Coke bottles refilled with red sugar water that functions as a hummingbird feeder.
You are your own evidence (2018) features an instructional text written on touch-sensitive blue paper. In a review in This is Tomorrow, Marta Faria writes, "Printed in a blue pigment that responds to touch, it is yet another poignant reminder of how the ordinary actions that the body performs are worthy enough of our fascination."
Both essayist and critic respond to Cordova gallery's environment and Hyte's commitment to the presence of other creatures in her work. Sparapani remarks, "To ensure an animal audience can access this piece, the gallery’s windows and doors will be kept open during open hours. The result is a viewer experience that opens up into multiple expanses and modes of being—Honey Week employs methods of understanding rooted in the textual and the sensual, affirming the body as a valid site of knowledge as a result."
Honey Week is on view at Cordova from March 3 - April 14, 2018.