ESTEFANIA PUERTA
Womb Wound

OCTOBER 11 - NOVEMBER 15, 2020

Reception: Sunday, OCTOBER 11, 12 - 7 PM

中文

“Mother maker who makes the mother after the mother falls apart? Maker of broken things, maker of not enough, maker of amulets for a prodded animal. Mother, make her, into a sore large enough for medicine, into a half spoken truth we gargle in our mouths, into the batting eye gathering rain in the corners of its tired landscapes. Who mothers the maker when the maker is lost and hungry? Who mothers the maker with desert feet cracked and bleeding disappearing”

- Estefania Puerta

SITUATIONS presents Womb Wound, Estefania Puerta’s first solo exhibition in New York City. A group of sculptures related in their use of dense and varied materials (both organic and inorganic) such as resin, dried flowers, wool, beeswax, steel, and glass question what a self-sustaining body can be in the face of failed systems and histories. Researching hysteria and personal histories of immigration and un-documentation in the United States led to the creation of these new bodies and environments.

The title of the exhibition, Womb Wound, explores what it means to nurse a wound -- to not fully heal, but to hold a wound close and find peace within the pain. References are made to the Wandering Womb, a medieval belief that the uterus was an animal-within-an-animal causing medical pathologies in women. Puerta considered how “to romance a womb back to its place, to romance a wound into a low hum of pain.” Her work threads ideas of birth as the first wound, existential suffering, how to make a self-sustaining body in a painful world, and how to forgive our mothers and become our own mothers. Self-identifying as an immigrant womxn, Puerta additionally questions what it means to migrate, and to find a way to our rightful place.

Puerta’s visceral work aims to feel foreign and familiar at the same time. What is considered “natural” and “alien” led to her investigation into the term sustainable -- what has been left to rot regenerates, becoming its own empowered agent. Separate sculptural works are integrated in a new world where figures beckon the viewer as much as they reject them. For example, “Mija,” a sculpture with multiple bulges takes on the form of a throne. The work was created with the goddess Artemis in mind (the goddess of fertility). The excess of breasts signal abundance  and health, but also allude to a grotesque obsession with fertility. Additionally, the sculpture has tassels of dyed and soiled mop heads, a material with a lot of personal history and memories for Puerta, which become both an homage to her family's material conditions in the U.S, as well as a critique of the fetishization of equating immigrants solely with their labor. Instead, components of labor and extensions of the body are layered with the idea that a mop filters and absorbs in the same way immigrants collectively hold and manage the excess of today’s society.

Another work, “Enrejada,” consists of lines of pierced ears. Realized during a time when the artist thought, “what we all really need to do is listen closely to ourselves and one another. I like the idea of the kind of vigilance a viewer may feel in thinking of a sculpture as being able to hear the viewer. Does the viewer become the speaker then?”

Using plant matter, rituals, customs, new organisms that emphasize what the body needs, Puerta's self-sustaining bodies can create their own nutrition and comfort in a world difficult to survive in.

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ESTEFANIA PUERTA (born 1988 in Manizales, Colombia) lives and works in Vermont and New York City. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2018), where she was awarded the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and a BS from the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT (2010). She has held exhibitions at Yale University Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, CT; Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; 263 Bowery, New York, NY; New City Galerie, Burlington, VT; and BCA, Burlington, VT. Womb Wound at SITUATIONS is her first solo exhibition in New York City.