Miwa Matreyek — Infinitely Yours…
Reviewed by Chenoa Baker

Miwa Matreyek is no stranger to narrative-based one woman shows. The animation and live shadow-dance performance of an excerpt from Infinitely Yours… starts with the femme-presenting silhouette cradling a baby then putting it down on a bed of moss, mushrooms, and other vegetation. Both figures have a halo or perhaps a circular porous boundary around them made of trees and grass on the surface that change as the visuals progress. The middle silhouette registers as Mother Earth. She moves and responds to the changing of the surface: farms to industry; industry to mines that extract blood from the heart of the silhouette and cause recoil; coal and oil begat skyscrapers with signage of currency; and then the figure becomes buried by landfills.

At this point the rising action builds to rockets (a timely illusion based on the recent history of Elon Musk’s cosmic colonialism mimicking the Space Race of the 50s), explosions, and the complete dissolution of the central figure. But the silhouette regenerates holding the baby even with tires coming at her (symbolic of the production of rubber). Late-stage capitalism is killing the earth, yet it continues to adapt to our neglect, disregard, and complicit harm. Like the theme of WaveForms, our decisions have powerful reverberations.

[Edited by curator, Georgie Friedman]