Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is delighted to announce the exhibition Transient Territories bringing together the works of Alice Quaresma (b. 1985, Brazil) and Marisa Telleria (b. 1963, Nicaragua).
Transient Territories explores how places we come from, we used to live and we are living in now shape our consciousness. Quaresma and Telleria investigate issues of loss, memory and nostalgia, colliding these topics with a reduced and formalistic language. Both artists reference their personal histories through the use of different media, in particular photography and installation, seeking to unearth the stratifications and subjectivity of memory. Transient Territories turns the gallery space into a temporary shelter for Quaresma’s and Telleria's longings and experiments.
Both artists share the experience of being immigrants from Latin America in the diaspora and both grapple with the notion of home. Quaresma and Telleria found an intersecting focal point of their ideas in Poetics of Space (1958) by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. They returned to this book before conceiving Transient Territories, where Bachelard emphasizes the importance of imagination and poetic reverie in our understanding of lived-in spaces.
Another important connecting element in both artists’ oeuvre is the importance of colour, its objective perception as well as its subjective charge and individual energy.
Marisa Telleria’s multidisciplinary practice ranges from painting to sculpture with a focus on installation. By distilling situations and historical events into elemental forms and by emphasizing the formal signs by which we register meaning, the artist documents quiet and ephemeral moments that define our sensorial experience. Telleria’s personal history, in particular the tense political situation in her home country Nicaragua, is referenced in some of her works. However, more than pointing to the biographical, they seek to provide context for questions of visual perception like in the floor installation made of blue and white paper straws 44 Steps.
Telleria was born in Managua, Nicaragua, she moved with her family to Miami, Florida, in 1978, where she grew up. Telleria received a BFA in sculpture from Florida International University in Miami and MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
A solo exhibition of her works will take place at Coral Gables Museum in Miami in 2024, following Telleria’s participation in the touring group show at Coral Gabels, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York and Print Studio Gallery, London
Her works are in the collection of the Frost Art Museum in Miami, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and the Washington National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Photography is the point of departure of Alice Quaresma’s practice. Analogue, as well as digital photographs of mostly landscapes from her personal archive are reworked by adding lines, shapes and colours to infuse these images with new denotations up to the point where imagination and reality overlap and collide. Sea views, forests and cityscapes are obliterated through collaged images which are recharged through formal and gestural abstract interventions in different media. The outcome is more layered and complex imagery, especially in the new series, relating to the ever more intricate and transitory lives we experience.
Alice Quaresma was born and grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She received a BFA in Painting from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute, New York. Quaresma is a recipient of the Aperture Foundation Summer Open Prize and Houston Center for Photography Annual Exhibition Prize, Foam Talent Prize and PS122 Exhibition Prize among others. Her solo and group exhibitions we held at PS122 Gallery in New York, Aperture Foundation in New York, Houston Centre for Photography in Houston, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and Caiza Cultural, São Paulo among others. Quaresma launched her artist book Playground in 2019 with the French publisher Editions Bessard.