Ours
Exhibition dates: November 6—December 18, 2021
LaPau Gallery is pleased to announce Maria Maea’s exhibition, Ours. Her present work is an installation that investigates life cycles through her harvesting of plants and weaving of family histories. Over a span of two years, Maea has kept a garden, cultivating it and bearing the fruits of her harvest, mainly The Three Sisters: squash, beans, maize, as bodily sustenance for herself and her art practice. Maea’s creative approach progresses in alignment to what she sees in the garden-cycles of life, death and birth. What she births, gestures towards a new body. Maea’s weaving of palms is central to the connections she makes palpable in her constructions. In Ours she has deconstructed past works and upcycled their materials evolving them into new forms giving them new life. Maea’s figures shift back and forth from plant to human to tapestry; an amalgamation of materiality that is natural, industrial, and familial. She molds her face, her mother's, and her niece's face to one echoing The Three Sisters and embodying the birth, life, death cycle. Pairing faces to her gestures visualizes something uncanny about the familiar. The power of her delicately woven leaves illustrates the complexity of a multilayered being--reflective of an indestructible communal knowing, that is ultimately ours to keep.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born and raised in Long Beach, California, (b. 1988) Maria Maea is a multi-disciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, film, music and performance. Maea's practice is rooted in the land, growing and tending to the materials she uses in her pieces and processes, reflective of an ancestral connection that employs ritual, and ceremony. Maea has had solo exhibitions, When I Come To at Coaxial Arts Foundation, (2018) and Previously Invisible to Me at Club Pro Gallery (2017) She has been part of group exhibitions at We Live, Memories of Resistance at OxyArts (2020), Deep Waters at Residency Art Gallery (2019) Pasado Manana at Commonwealth and Council (2018), and tell no lies / claim no easy victories at Human Resources (2018). Maea works as a fashion, set costume, and prop designer and has worked for clients such as Nike, Beak, Beyonce, Earl Sweatshirt, and San Cha.
