Claudia Cuesta, I Trust Myself, 1999, . Courtesy of the artist.
July 26–August 17, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 25, 5:00–8:00p.m.
Public critique with Matthew Hyland: Thursday, August 8, 2:00 p.m.
Or Gallery
236 E Pender Street
Vancouver BC
Wednesday–Saturday: 12:00–5:00p.m.
Curated by Ellinee Rae Nelson
Claudia Cuesta: Of Being Between is the first retrospective look at the Colombian-Canadian artist’s prolific career. Since the 1980s, Cuesta has integrated multimedia approaches to sculpture that reflect interdependent relationships between material and process. Her contributions are distinguished by dynamic allusions to the human body that call into question the nature of the medium. The exhibition emphasizes her multidisciplinarity, use of diverse materials, and embodied processes by bringing together sculptural installation, painting, poetry, photography, and collage.
In Of Being Between, Cuesta creates textural juxtapositions through combinations of velvet and neon, glass and steel, canvas and plastic. Her methodology involves meticulously selecting materials that she activates through a process of deep self-reflection and physically laborious experimentation. She hand-fabricates each work and transposes her internal landscape onto the materials. A reciprocal relationship develops over time as she embraces the implications that this process has on her own body. Experientially, this exhibition encompasses and communicates the physical dynamics that imbue Cuesta’s methodology within the space of the gallery.
Cuesta’s work challenges, often playfully, the manufactured belief systems, power structures, and technologies that shape our worldviews and identities. Speaking to both the personal and collective aspects of embodiment and grief, Cuesta’s work reveals the fluidity between individual and shared experiences. In a time when the boundaries between the personal and the collective are constantly being renegotiated, Of Being Between offers an urgent reflection on interdependence.
Of Being Between is presented with support from the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.
Claudia Cuesta
Claudia Cuesta (b. 1954) is a Colombian artist, teacher and mentor based in Sechelt, BC. As a multidisciplinary sculptor, Cuesta integrates sound, film, photography, performance, and poetry into her practice. She has worked with industrial, intangible, and organic materials, such as copper, air, beeswax, velvet, light, and wood. While hand fabricating simple forms, Cuesta plays with scale, texture, and colour. Cuesta explores the interdependence between the material world and identity, mediated through her experiences of motherhood, immigration, and loss.
Cuesta graduated with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 1988. Her work has since been exhibited at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Power Plant, Toronto; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; the Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá; and other venues.
Since 2003, Cuesta has worked collaboratively with urban designer and artist Bill Baker under the name art.site, specializing in the integration of art and architecture. They have undertaken public art commissions and numerous artist residencies, including a recent residency at RAMA, Torres Vedras, Portugal. Cuesta taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design until 2008, at the Universidad Nacional, Colombia, in 1995 and at schools in England between 1989 and 1993. Her work is held in collections, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, Bogota and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha.
Ellinee Nelson
Ellinee Rae Nelson (b. 1996) is originally from Chicago—the unceded ancestral homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations—and is currently based in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Ellinee is an MA candidate in the Critical Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia. She holds a BA in Art History from Columbia College Chicago where she began her career in art handling, collections management, and arts administration. Ellinee’s curatorial practice is dedicated to queer and feminist perspectives in contemporary art, archive and collections research, and uncovering underrepresented practices. In her research, Ellinee uses disabled embodiment and access intimacy as tools to trouble the limits of engagement with contemporary art and exhibitions. Referencing her own disability and chronic illness, Ellinee is interested in autotheory as a methodological approach to develop an accessible curatorial praxis.