Drip-Drop the mines are broken

 Tatiana Blass Barragem (2025) Armory Show September 2025

The Armory Show returned to New York City last week, a dizzying convergence of contemporary works in a single hall. The fair shimmered with its familiar spectacle and theatrical energy, with massive paintings and unapologetically bold visuals. Collectors, curators, critics, and the occasional lay admirer like me moved from booth to booth, their excited chatter filling the Javits Center. Yet amid that display, one work carried a quieter, almost fragile message: water falling, drop by drop, onto a sculpture of mud, eroding it with every touch. At first I thought to myself, does this artist know she’s supposed to be selling her work, not letting it dissolve before our eyes? But I was captivated by the sacrifice. Without realizing it, I struck up a conversation with her, assuming she was part of the gallery staff. When she smiled and said, “This is my work,” I was caught off guard and suddenly felt I had been given a more personal insight into the piece.

The artist was Tatiana Blass, and the work was titled Barragem (2025), made from ceramic, clay, a glass dripper, water, and an iron frame. The piece evokes Brazil’s mining dam disasters, regarded as among the worst mining failures in recent decades. In 2015, a tailings dam in Mariana collapsed, sending more than 40 million cubic meters of toxic mud rushing through villages and down the Doce River to the Atlantic. Four years later, in Brumadinho, another dam gave way with even greater force, releasing a flood of waste that reshaped the landscape. Both disasters left lives lost and lasting ecological scars, exposing the fragility of these massive earthen structures, known as barragens, and the impossibility of containing mud and water forever. Watching water slowly erode the clay in Blass’s piece felt like more than a metaphor: it was a quiet reckoning with fragility, collapse, and the human cost of extraction.

And while this was the work that first drew me to Blass, it is not where her art stops. As the New York Times has pointed out, her paintings are “populated by distant, spectral suggestions of human figures, walking, juggling, half-present,” which she sometimes heightens into sculptural relief. These figures often inhabit landscapes of rock quarries or hot springs, settings that recall the mines and their scars. Together, they extend her ongoing meditation on labor, fragility, and the uneasy balance between human presence and the earth that sustains it.

What struck me most was how beautifully balanced her work felt, a meeting point of art and science. Barragem was not a scientific experiment, yet it carried the clarity of one: water falling at a steady rate, erosion unfolding predictably over time, cause and effect laid bare. At the same time, it was charged with metaphor and history, turning geological process into testimony. Blass bridges these registers with quiet precision. Her mud, clay, and water are the same materials studied by geologists and environmental scientists, but here they become instruments of memory and critique, a way of holding us in the tension between permanence and collapse. In the midst of the Armory’s spectacle, Barragem lingered as both artwork and witness, a reminder that sometimes the quietest pieces carry the heaviest weight.

See the full timeline of the work here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DObfEuPkUQ0/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet