Spell For The Next 6,000 Years, 2026
Installation view, Spell for the Next 6,000 Years (2026). Vinyl mural, two-channel looping digital video, soundscape, wooden altar, ceramic vessels, blue corn, and textiles. The central altar holds the ceramic vessel where visitors offer a grain of blue corn imbued with an intention for those who will inherit this land 6,000 years from now.
Frías’ work combines magical practice with indigenous futurisms and queer utopias through digital art, performance and installation. Their work is a sensory riot of pure joy, a world of rainbow delights, where spirits and ancestors from indigenous Mexican Wixárika tradition consort with aliens, where all beings, plants, crystals and other than human animals share their wisdom.
The bold, colorful art of Edgar Fabián Frías is interwoven with spells designed to inspire change, love, delight, healing and new futures in a world feeling perpetually on the brink. Frías’ immersive environments are designed to create portals to other imaginative realities.
-Curator Dr. Amy Hale
Artwork created as a compositional detail toward the large-scale nierika vinyl wall mural, a study in color-field transitions, sacred geometry, and the reflexive multiplicity of seeing.
Participatory installation: site-specific vinyl mural, two-channel looping digital video, soundscape, wooden altar, ceramic vessels, blue corn, textiles.
Edgar Fabián Frías' Spell for the Next 6,000 Years operates at the intersection of ritual practice and site-specific installation, positioning the gallery as an active altar rather than a passive viewing space. The work draws a deliberate geographic and cultural line between North Carolina and California, using material culture to bridge two distinct indigenous lineages: the Catawba peoples, whose documented presence on the exhibition's land spans roughly 6,000 years, and Frías' own Wixárika-influenced heritage rooted in California.
This bridging is enacted through the piece's core materials rather than through image alone. A hand-thrown ceramic vessels anchor the installation in its immediate location, honoring the long-documented history of clay work by the Catawba community, while blue corn, sacred within Frías' own cultural tradition, functions as a portable, participatory medium.
A Nierika-inspired vinyl mural, characteristic of Wixárika visionary art, maps flora, fauna, and energetic motifs from both regions into a single, unified cosmographic field, visually collapsing the distance between the two lineages the work invokes.
Frías structures the installation around a three-part visitor action: reflection within the space, the imbuing of a single grain of blue corn with a personal intention, and the offering of that grain into the ceramic vessel. This transforms the audience from observers into collaborators, and the artwork itself into a slow-accumulating, durational object.
Over the course of the exhibition, the filling vessel becomes a literal time capsule: a distributed, collectively authored artifact addressed not to the present but to the human and more-than-human inheritors of this land six millennia from now.
The piece exemplifies Frías' broader practice, which merges indigenous futurisms, queer utopian thinking, and explicitly magical or ritual frameworks within a contemporary installation context. Rather than depicting spellcasting as subject matter, Spell for the Next 6,000 Years enacts it as method; treating collective intention, material specificity, and durational participation as the artwork's primary media.
"Holding a Bright Untroubled Sky: Visioning a Better World Through Magic" — curated by Amy Hale. Aug 10–Sept 18, opening reception Aug 27, 6–8pm. Rowe Galleries, UNC Charlotte.
Spell for the Next 6,000 Years was created for Holding a Bright Untroubled Sky: Visioning a Better World Through Magic, a group exhibition curated by Dr. Amy Hale, on view at the Rowe Galleries at UNC Charlotte from August 10 through September 18, 2026.
The show brings together 14 international artists and collectives, including: John Abell, Alice Bucknell, CROSSLUCID, Angela Fraleigh, Heather Freeman, Hilma's Ghost, Loni Johnson, Alessandro Keegan, Anna Kenar, Tai Shani, Mark Titchner, Suzanne Triester, and Erik Waterkotte.
Exploring magic as a tool for envisioning collective transformation. Its curatorial premise holds that the first step toward a better world begins within each of us, and that art rooted in magical thinking can help plant those seeds by inspiring joy, connection, and wonder.