Influenced in various ways by the Light and Space movement, the artist approaches a visual description of distance through fragmented shifts in light, shadow, and movement—foregrounding the body’s relationship to its environment. The artwork traces how personal histories of migration and cultural dislocation surface not through direct representation, but through an engagement with tension: between material and metaphor, weight and lightness, concealment and revelation.
Maria Esthela’s site-responsive sculptural installation approaches migration as both a natural phenomenon and social condition. 815 (Birds in Space) extends from artworks of an almost identical name by Constantin Brancusi and Liz Larner, respectively, pluralizing the pieces from the vantage point of a combined perspective. Like Larner from Brancusi, Maria Esthela’s intricate copper work builds upon a shifting form that appears to be taking off and dissipating in the air, much like the movements of birds or monarch butterflies during migration.
- Erin Storus
Photography by LF Documentation
