About this Event
Within My Safest Place, we explore the mother's body as a sacred place – an incubator, a temple-like environment - during pregnancy, birth, and infancy.
Whose experience are we witnessing — the one giving life, or the one receiving it? At the center of the work is the subjective perception of reproduction: what it may feel like to give life, to engage in one of the most culturally invisibilized and dangerous acts, yet still the singular form of creation for the continuation of humankind. At the same time, the exhibition reaches toward the perception of an infant - attempting to depict the mother as the whole world - the way she might first be seen, felt, and perceived.
The exhibition encompasses papier-mâché sculptures and reliefs, soil installation, acrylic paintings and original works on paper.
The drawings of ideas on display were created as the basis for other work and were never intended to be shown at the time of their making. They are an immediate physical manifestation of ideas in the moment of their conception. This offers viewers an authentic insight into the artist's creative process.
In contrast, compositions of the displayed sculptures, reliefs, and paintings that are made based on the drawings are more balanced, minimalistic, and strong, resembling a carefully considered mandala or symbol.
Each sculpture is unique - created without molds or reproductions. Recycling household paper waste and other single-use materials consumed within our contemporary everyday environment – the artist hand-sculpted forms through a slow, layer-by-layer paper-mâché making process. The sculptural pieces incorporate the soil of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples, from Denver, Colorado, where the cesarean-section sculptures on view originate.
The soil for the installation at the Aurelia Gallery was borrowed for the duration of the exhibition from the surrounding ancestral homeland of the Pueblo peoples of the Tewa-speaking nations in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Incorporation of these materials grounds the work in the physical space of its origin.
Select sculptural forms are hand-painted with layered applications of acrylic paint - the same technique used within the circular and square paintings and reliefs throughout the exhibition.
Event venue
Aurelia Gallery, 414 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, United States
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