Irreversible Magazine – Grimanesa Amorós
What happens when you let the world around you settle in enough so that it can actually meet what’s inside of you?
Grimanesa Amorós’ multidisciplinary creations are some of the things that can happen.
She has acreated numerous public works to brighten drab city streets with lights, color and spirit in the deep asphalt canyons of Queens, Harlem, Pittsburg and Miami, among other places.
However, one of the most moving and creative aspects of Grimanesa’s work is her multitude of installations. In the Hardcore Art Contemporary Space in Miami (2000-3), she produced “You Cannot Feel It… I Wish You Could”. She sculptued paper casts of her own body when she was pregnant with her daughter, Shammiel. She then attached male heads to the torsos, exploring the “What If?” scenario of male pregnancy. She added music by Meshell Ndgegeocello and eerie, dramatic lighting to confront the viewer with her unusual precept.
Grimanesa piled casts of her own body parts on top of one another and provided them with music by Johnny Perl (“Avalanche”, 2002-4) in order to explore our ephemeral presence on this planet.
Then she found a connection between places as far apart in mood and distance as public housing projects in New York City and the in habitants of the fjords of Central Norway in the realization that if these places’ young people immigrate in search of fresher, perhaps more comfortable and profitable places, the cultures that depend on them for continuity will inevitably disappear. In “Between Heaven and Earth”, (2004-6) she found intriguing ways of combining her sculptures with lighting, humongous slide projections of these two diametrically opposed locations and accompanied the presentation with the music of Susana Baca, an international exponent of afro-Peruvian themes, to express these parallels and contradictions.
This year Grimanesa molded translucent sheets of abaca paper into large sculptures and combined the music of Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, her videos of ‘Rootless Algas’ floating on the icy seas off Flatey, an Icelandic island, and wonderful lighting all coming together to express thoughts and inner feelings for a moody and moving installation exploring the relations between human beings and nature.
This and so much more, in so many more places…paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, videos, encaustic tiles…Ecuador, Africa… Grimanesa Amorós is a Peruvian New Yorker…
a child of the world.