Mnemosyne – Traversing Boundaries on Meandering Routes of Memory
Traces in the Land — Fragments of Memory
My work explores nature, time, and memory. It is multidisciplinary since it goes from painting and drawing to sculpture, installations (including video, photo, and site interventions) to dialogue with the site and space.
I am interested in process and transformation. The work explores issues as dualities and contradictions between the natural and the artificial, the rational and the emotional, the permanent and the precarious or ephemeral.
I use various materials: lead, water, stone, aluminum, letting each one of them express their own specific qualities, such as malleability, toxicity, atemporality, or permanence.
Some work evolves from walks or journeys, recording or documenting them in various ways, making evident the “traces” of time and memory of each site. It becomes a personal, emotional mapping of the sites I encounter.
These installations become environments with an archaeological nuance or interventions on site specific public spaces, where I try to make visible the marks, traces, or fissures of the urban sidewalks or the landscape. The main concern is to make visible the non-visible, enter into the details of the everyday surroundings, often overlooked, drawing attention to the specific traces of the site, the topography, normally seen but not really perceived. A kind of unearthing the overlooked, raising the mundane and everyday to empower it with a beauty and rarity of its own.
Traces in the Land – Fragments of Memory is a process oriented piece, an installation that transforms and shifts, first, a Cabinet of Curiosities that then evolves into an installation where one can walk and both see and feel layers of significance.
This project traces “landscapes” from sidewalks, fragments of a topography, including broken fragments of walls, with the goal of trying to piece together the memory of a land and of a specific site through considering Cd. Juarez in the border between Mexico and USA, a place of dualities, of tremendous violence, and where at times memory wants to be erased. The installation is a multilayered process-oriented piece, a work in progress with layers, stones, and pieces of walls from the site recollected in a short 3 day trip in May of 2010.
Perla Krauze
Perla Krauze studied graphic design at the National School of Visual Arts (ENAP) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In 1977 she traveled to London and obtained a diploma in textiles at Goldsmiths College, and in 1992 she returned to the city as an MFA student at the Chelsea College of Arts.
Her work has been shown in Mexico and abroad in solo and group exhibitions, including: Small Landscapes from near and far, (The Chimney, NYC, 2019); Lithic Material: Memory/Processes/Accumulations (Museo Amparo, Puebla, 2017); Archipiélagos (Galería Quetzalli, Oaxaca, 2016); Dualidades (GAALS, Culiacán, 2014); Estructuras/Materiales/Espacio (Diagrama, Mexico City, 2014); Suspended Blues (Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, 2013); Structure/Imprints (Howard Scott Gallery, New York, 2013); Pino Suárez 3, Memoria y Recorridos (Museo de la Ciudad de México, 2012); Huellas y Trayectos (retrospective, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, 2010); José Alvarado 24 A/Guerrero 27 Nte. (Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, 2010); Imprints (Gebert Contemporary, Santa Fe, 2010); Huellas de la Santa Veracruz (Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City, 2007); Orígenes (MACO, Mexico City, 1997); and Amarres de Luz y Silencio (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, 1995).
She has received acknowledgments from institutions such as the UNAM and the British Council, and she has taken part in various artists’ residency programs, such as: the Red Gate Gallery in China; the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in Japan; the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada; MacDowell Colony, NH; the Santa Fe Art Institute and Djerassi Residency Artists Program in USA.
Her work forms part of important public and private collections at the MUAC, Museo Amparo, Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, MUAC-UNAM, Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Museo de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, Museo de la Cancillería, and Colección Manuel Felguérez, all in Mexico; Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC; MOLAA, CA; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Sprint Art Collection, Freedman Gallery-Albright College, Bank of America, all in USA.
She has been a member of the FONCA, Mexico’s Arts Council, on several occasions receiving production grants from this arts program. She has been a member of Royal Society of Sculptors since January of 2020.
