Maria Martinez-Cañas. Transformative Structures

About

Supported by a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, these new assemblages created between 2016 and 2017 introduce a dramatic shift in style and medium. With the presence of drawing and sculpture, Cañas questions conventional practices in the field of conceptual photography. 

The earliest works in the show derive from her Rebus + Diversion collage series and are formed from personal memorabilia, largely the archive of Cuban curator and critic José Gómez-Sicre and artist Cundo Bermúdez, both of whom have close family ties to Cañas’ family going back to pre-revolution. With this recent work, she is attempting to synthesize all that came before, inspired by her “heroes” such as European Modernists Henry Moore, Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius and Latin Americans Gego, Jesús Rafael Soto and more recently Sandú Darié. 

A catalog available in conjunction with the show contains an essay by Manuel González entitled  A Walk on the Wild Side as well as 14 plates, and can be ordered directly from the gallery. González maintains that this is her most ambitious inventive and personal body of work to date. Cañas has always experimented with traditional and experimental photographic printing processes from platinum and diazo prints to video and abrasion techniques. The content of her work has ranged from sensual explorations of nature, to identity (as a displaced Cuban), and delving into more personal themes. She often incorporates references to art history as a way of defining her position within it.