Juliana Cerqueira Leite

UNTIL DIFFERENT, SEPTEMBER 13 - November 8, 2018, arsenal contemporary, new york

UNTIL DIFFERENT, SEPTEMBER 13 - November 8, 2018, arsenal contemporary, new york

Culminating from her research on ancient Amazonian funerary urns discovered in contemporary Brazil, In Until Different the artist presents a series of human-scaled vessels created through a deft casting process of her body. The anthropomorphism of the hydrocal sculptures relates to the primary objects of the artist’s study which dually functioned as containers and portals, like machines meant to hold the body of the deceased while processing its loss, and, sometimes animal, morphing into the afterlife. Like these urns, Cerqueira Leite’s sculptures are tightly wound between preservation and transmutation. They spill out from the artist’s body, seemingly evincing, something like, their original form, as they continue to lose, gather and modulate the information that enabled their creation. One can make out parts of the body, the artist’s breasts and fingers, for example, but these parts are cannibalized onto themselves as they are caught outside of fixed singular perspective; they disintegrate in the casting process which was paradoxically meant to conserve them.

Exhibition works