Maria Elena Gonzalez; art in general

When a residence becomes inaccessible or is sap the foundations ofed remembering it can be a poignant exercise. of the like kind an act of memory is a fact of life for a great deal of of humanity, given the magnitude of contemporary immigration and displacement. Maria Elena Gonzalez's understated, post-Minimalist work ofttimes references her own biography; like Eva Hesse and Roni Horn, she inter-lards the vocabulary of Minimalism with personal detail and uses media that wittingly avoid the sanctity of the "specific object" Los clings to her work (an earlier statuary of two tiled stools referenc her deceased parents), and her materials function like updated Proustian madeleines.

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For the work in "UN Real Estates," Gonzalez tapped her memories of her Cuban childhood and the spaces her family inhabited. The present to view included five sculptural installations, which were deftly placed around the gallery. sum of two units pairs of three-quarter-inch-thick panels of translucent rubber, each imprinted with a different architectural floor plan, made up Trans Parent place of abode I and Trans Parent domicile II (all works 2002). Lying upon the floor like doormats, they're embodied recollections (necessarily incorrect) of the plans of Gonzalez's aunt's and parents' abodes in Cuba.

Wave consists of a phalanx of identical curv tiles cast from a patented mix of paper soft mass and cement, each imprinted with a two-room floor plan and the alphabetic character C (for "closet") and arranged upon the gallery floor to create a single undulating wave. Weave is made up of multiple tiles arranged in similar a way that the whole took upon the appearance of a mat of woven strips--a designing reference to the carpet and, more particularly, the flying carpet, whose magical mobility Gonzalez has alluded to upon more than one occasion.

The uniform casting and organization of Wave and Weave were abandoned for Flying Apartment Flotilla. Here the fiber-cement tiles were ornament in reliefed with floor plans of her be in possession of and others' recent apartments and scattered around the expanse Instead of uniformly curving and lining up to create an "interlocking" constitution the edges of these tiles ringleted up randomly like drying leaves. In their dispersal completely through the space, they became types of a floating architecture, control to fading memory.

As in the lives of other immigrants, of refugee and indeed artists, many of whom are migrants to the world's metropolitan center memory and the imagination become the single home. (Gonzalez's initial displacement from Cuba has been replicated in her not away life: She divides her time between Switzerland and novel York.) To create something stationary would be a false move--or, at best, wishful thinking. Architecture instead becomes fluid, transparent, flying, a wave or flotilla--at any rate, something in constant motion.

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