Minerva Cuevas and WangShui are part of the 12th SITE SANTA FE International Exhibition Once Within a Time, by curator Cecilia Alemani.

The exhibition revolves around a vibrant collection of over twenty characters—or figures of interest—with close ties to the Southwest. This diverse cast encompasses local heroes, mythical beings, unassuming residents, reclusive artists, distinctive writers, and charismatic healers. Many of the featured artists have created new works that respond, directly or indirectly, to the experiences and lore of these figures. The commissions are shown alongside contemporary works from around the world, offering insights into the region’s rich history and its artistic and literary heritage.

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minerva cuevas – dust rising from the dances, 2025

Minerva Cuevas’s site-specific mural Dust Rising from the Dances sits under the big skies of the Southwest, presenting an allegory of human nature and its conflict with the industrial progress.

A hybrid tree-cloud sports an omnipresent General Electric logo together with local flora and fauna—a reminder of the extractive history in New Mexico and the disruption of the land’s water cycles. Traveling from the surface down into the depths of the earth, fracking disrupts and destroys biodiversity as well as the paleontological and archaeological wealth found underground. Through Cuevas' pictorial storytelling, images become systems of signifiers luring us into an archeology of economic and historical actors invoking the sacred rain falling from the skies.

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wangshui & maryam hoseini – the demon and the muse (dm), 2025

The Demon and the Muse (DM) (2025), the first major collaborative work by WangShui and Maryam Hoseini, is a translucent mural made directly on the glass facade of SITE SANTA FE’s entryway. Rendered in oil paint, ink, and pastel on vinyl, the work refracts the sun’s rays both into the foyer and outward. Over the course of each day, light animates and transforms Hoseini’s contorted figures and Wangshui’s tessellated, serpentine forms. DM also reflects the pair’s entwined conceptual concerns—hybridity, liminality, and the circuitous structures that govern and connect us.

WangShui and Hoseini’s DM reenvisions the ouroboros as both myth and mechanism: a loop in which technology, corporeality, and desire perpetually feed back into one another. Here this ancient alchemical symbol is likened to a contemporary condition—a recursive structure that mirrors our entanglement with the digital rhythms and data cycles of mediated intimacy. Yet despite its references to enclosed, spiraling forms, the work retains an unexpected porosity. Mediated by (and, in turn, transmuting) the building’s original glass, DM filters light to reconstitute the entry/exit as an unbounded, luminous threshold. As fiery-hued colors dance throughout and beyond the institutional space, light bleeds between the psychic architectures we inhabit and those that inhabit us.

This project is inspired by their long friendship and endless conversations about life and painting under the influence of technology.

Text by Sophia Larigakis

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+about Minerva Cuevas

+about WangShui

+about the exhibition