Sebastian Maquieira
b.1978 Santiago, Chile
CV
In 2003 Maquieira graduated from the prestigious Finis Terrae University with a degree in Fine Arts. That same year he was awarded a scholarship to intern in the studio of Eugenio Téllez for six months in NYC. Maquieira has exhibited extensively in his native Chile and also in Ecuador, Buenos Aires and London, UK.
"I'm interested in exploring the different possibilities that certain objects and materials that come from within our cultural surroundings can offer. Once I am done with manipulating and transforming them, what they offer is a reflection on some of the ideas around the construction of our social identity that I am interested in exploring. This is how these new artifacts or montages where the sum of the parts are in a tense intersection so their aesthetic qualities can be activated as much as their functions and signals that inhabit and operate within our conscience."
CV
In 2003 Maquieira graduated from the prestigious Finis Terrae University with a degree in Fine Arts. That same year he was awarded a scholarship to intern in the studio of Eugenio Téllez for six months in NYC. Maquieira has exhibited extensively in his native Chile and also in Ecuador, Buenos Aires and London, UK.
"I'm interested in exploring the different possibilities that certain objects and materials that come from within our cultural surroundings can offer. Once I am done with manipulating and transforming them, what they offer is a reflection on some of the ideas around the construction of our social identity that I am interested in exploring. This is how these new artifacts or montages where the sum of the parts are in a tense intersection so their aesthetic qualities can be activated as much as their functions and signals that inhabit and operate within our conscience."
eroding territory at PatelBrown
curated by Cecilia González Godino
28 March - 11 may 2024
28 March - 11 may 2024
a body, a continental jut
a density of times past
an assemblage of other who are you, a being made of beings
linked down the falls’ vertical down the ribbons of water that
narrow and turn helices vanish into the emerald i down who
parents? down waterfall, down rock, down moss-soft crater, down frond
of the giant bromeliad down past the abstract pointillism
of mosquito swarms, down foreign, afar down the streaming roar
down the curtain of lives, the bustle and drip leaf folds, moss
grandparents? i pass them on the way down.
they belong to other families indi-, akan?
i do not know them. portu- chi-?
homeExcerpt from a poem in Magnetic Equator, by Kaie Kellough (2019)
The term “territory” comes from the Latin terra torium or “the land that belongs to someone.” To speak of “territory,” or to approach geopolitical history in “territorial” terms, therefore entails an alleged human right of possession of the land—that has too often granted ownership of its natural resources and its inhabitants to those claiming its “discovery.”
With the notion of territory also came the superficial and artificial delimitation of the natural space, creating the illusion of containment and of borders to respond to imperial needs, and to then articulate a national identity. Colonial mappings emptied the environment of meaning, both delineating its possibilities and disregarding those geological and subaltern elements that exist beyond the superficial and flattening vision that western imperatives imposed on the Earth.
The artists featured in this exhibition dismantle colonial structures of landscape by reclaiming a geological agency that allows them to dive into the sediments and layers of their diasporic identities—to dive into a “terra” with multiple spaces, undercurrents, and temporalities.
The silkscreened maps by Sebastián Maquieira engage with the pictorial vocabulary of cartography while hinting at its silences, echoes, and excesses. By superimposing the symbols and languages of mapping—illustrations of boats, botanical drawings, technological progress, architectural elements…—to the colonial map, he destabilizes its authority to prompt questions about human intervention and human representations of nature. The questioning of western views of nature is also evident in Assaf Evron's layered photographs of the inside of caves. Trimming the mat board that holds them, the artist forces a visual perspective on the cave while insisting on the impossibilities of its representation. Caves are living organisms carved out by water that do not respond to the territorial systems of the surface: rather than linear processes of expansion, they take shape through processes of erosion.
Also reflecting on the ebb and flow of geological formations and human deformations, Farah Salem imbues desert rock landscapes with movement—breaking the illusion of stillness and permanence that often filters their forms of representation. Invoking a deterritorialized existence through ritual, oral history and archival materials, the artist inscribes geological language in her own diasporic and intergenerational history. A similar sense of suspension permeates the work of Marigold Santos, who addresses the perception of fragmentation that often accompanies the diasporic condition and that presents the migrant body as a territorialized surface. Instead, the artist ventures into a psychic territory of shapeshifting and multiplicity that erodes essentialist notions of identity. Mimicking the natural processes of weathering and erosion, Santos’ memory hoodoos conjure up an interlocking relationship between the ritual, the archival, and the geological.
Colonial notions of territory are undoubtedly inhabited by many specters haunting official accounts of history that remain unchanged. And with a lethargic swaying of Atlantic waves, Martha Atienza stirs the fossilized waters of history. The title—a group of coordinates marking a diluted point on the map of the ocean—ironically reveals the impossibility of locating the geological in a static point. In turn, breaking through the lethargy of history with dissonance and juxtaposition, Alberta Whittle injects the atrocious realities of the Middle Passage into the apparent tranquility and innocence of the Atlantic. Once confronted with the complicity of the ocean in absorbing and diluting the violence against Black bodies, the artist allows for a space of regeneration and healing.
If Whittle’s work prompts the question “what sound does the Black Atlantic make?,” the installation by Kara Springer deconstructs the shape of mountains, particularly of Caribbean mountains, through infinite levels of abstraction. Echoing the stories of marronage in Jamaica, where escaped enslaved Africans found refuge in the mountains and in their intricate terrains, the artist rearticulates geological history as one of agency, of emancipatory processes that transcend national frameworks. A movement of similar discordance is staged by Christina Leslie, whose practice forces a material encounter between plantation economies, colonial architectures, colonial forms of representation, and trade products. Printed on cane sugar paper, distorted images of colonialism are here materially sustained by the trafficking and forced labor of enslaved Black bodies.
Also reformulating the landscapes of territory, history, and identity through material investigations, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka summons the poetic potential of the Japanese traditional handcrafted paper washi. Processed by hand and infused with the spiraloid and patchworked history of the human, animal, and geological bodies that integrate it, the vulnerability of paper becomes a resilient relational materiality. Similarly, Nep Sidhu interrogates the mappings and writings of memory, orchestrating a constellation of possibilities that emerge from the dialogue between the geometric form and the rhythms of nature and history. By gradually reducing the size of calligraphy as the script plunges into the spiral, the artist engages with environmental degradation and a chronic detachment from nature.
In eroding territory, notions of belonging that presuppose a physical connection to the land are proven to be impossible in the face of the organic, symbolic, and historical vestiges of colonial expansion, chattel slavery, imperial extraction, land dispossession, and forced migration.
This exhibition investigates how migratory experiences—either forced or voluntary—and diasporic existences break down categories of national identity and of national territory that have served as modern forms of control. Human movement, and the multiple forms of violence that have determined its routes over the centuries, also enabled intangible forms of connection and below-the-surface entanglements that escape western accounts of history and of identity.
– Cecilia González Godino
a density of times past
an assemblage of other who are you, a being made of beings
linked down the falls’ vertical down the ribbons of water that
narrow and turn helices vanish into the emerald i down who
parents? down waterfall, down rock, down moss-soft crater, down frond
of the giant bromeliad down past the abstract pointillism
of mosquito swarms, down foreign, afar down the streaming roar
down the curtain of lives, the bustle and drip leaf folds, moss
grandparents? i pass them on the way down.
they belong to other families indi-, akan?
i do not know them. portu- chi-?
homeExcerpt from a poem in Magnetic Equator, by Kaie Kellough (2019)
The term “territory” comes from the Latin terra torium or “the land that belongs to someone.” To speak of “territory,” or to approach geopolitical history in “territorial” terms, therefore entails an alleged human right of possession of the land—that has too often granted ownership of its natural resources and its inhabitants to those claiming its “discovery.”
With the notion of territory also came the superficial and artificial delimitation of the natural space, creating the illusion of containment and of borders to respond to imperial needs, and to then articulate a national identity. Colonial mappings emptied the environment of meaning, both delineating its possibilities and disregarding those geological and subaltern elements that exist beyond the superficial and flattening vision that western imperatives imposed on the Earth.
The artists featured in this exhibition dismantle colonial structures of landscape by reclaiming a geological agency that allows them to dive into the sediments and layers of their diasporic identities—to dive into a “terra” with multiple spaces, undercurrents, and temporalities.
The silkscreened maps by Sebastián Maquieira engage with the pictorial vocabulary of cartography while hinting at its silences, echoes, and excesses. By superimposing the symbols and languages of mapping—illustrations of boats, botanical drawings, technological progress, architectural elements…—to the colonial map, he destabilizes its authority to prompt questions about human intervention and human representations of nature. The questioning of western views of nature is also evident in Assaf Evron's layered photographs of the inside of caves. Trimming the mat board that holds them, the artist forces a visual perspective on the cave while insisting on the impossibilities of its representation. Caves are living organisms carved out by water that do not respond to the territorial systems of the surface: rather than linear processes of expansion, they take shape through processes of erosion.
Also reflecting on the ebb and flow of geological formations and human deformations, Farah Salem imbues desert rock landscapes with movement—breaking the illusion of stillness and permanence that often filters their forms of representation. Invoking a deterritorialized existence through ritual, oral history and archival materials, the artist inscribes geological language in her own diasporic and intergenerational history. A similar sense of suspension permeates the work of Marigold Santos, who addresses the perception of fragmentation that often accompanies the diasporic condition and that presents the migrant body as a territorialized surface. Instead, the artist ventures into a psychic territory of shapeshifting and multiplicity that erodes essentialist notions of identity. Mimicking the natural processes of weathering and erosion, Santos’ memory hoodoos conjure up an interlocking relationship between the ritual, the archival, and the geological.
Colonial notions of territory are undoubtedly inhabited by many specters haunting official accounts of history that remain unchanged. And with a lethargic swaying of Atlantic waves, Martha Atienza stirs the fossilized waters of history. The title—a group of coordinates marking a diluted point on the map of the ocean—ironically reveals the impossibility of locating the geological in a static point. In turn, breaking through the lethargy of history with dissonance and juxtaposition, Alberta Whittle injects the atrocious realities of the Middle Passage into the apparent tranquility and innocence of the Atlantic. Once confronted with the complicity of the ocean in absorbing and diluting the violence against Black bodies, the artist allows for a space of regeneration and healing.
If Whittle’s work prompts the question “what sound does the Black Atlantic make?,” the installation by Kara Springer deconstructs the shape of mountains, particularly of Caribbean mountains, through infinite levels of abstraction. Echoing the stories of marronage in Jamaica, where escaped enslaved Africans found refuge in the mountains and in their intricate terrains, the artist rearticulates geological history as one of agency, of emancipatory processes that transcend national frameworks. A movement of similar discordance is staged by Christina Leslie, whose practice forces a material encounter between plantation economies, colonial architectures, colonial forms of representation, and trade products. Printed on cane sugar paper, distorted images of colonialism are here materially sustained by the trafficking and forced labor of enslaved Black bodies.
Also reformulating the landscapes of territory, history, and identity through material investigations, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka summons the poetic potential of the Japanese traditional handcrafted paper washi. Processed by hand and infused with the spiraloid and patchworked history of the human, animal, and geological bodies that integrate it, the vulnerability of paper becomes a resilient relational materiality. Similarly, Nep Sidhu interrogates the mappings and writings of memory, orchestrating a constellation of possibilities that emerge from the dialogue between the geometric form and the rhythms of nature and history. By gradually reducing the size of calligraphy as the script plunges into the spiral, the artist engages with environmental degradation and a chronic detachment from nature.
In eroding territory, notions of belonging that presuppose a physical connection to the land are proven to be impossible in the face of the organic, symbolic, and historical vestiges of colonial expansion, chattel slavery, imperial extraction, land dispossession, and forced migration.
This exhibition investigates how migratory experiences—either forced or voluntary—and diasporic existences break down categories of national identity and of national territory that have served as modern forms of control. Human movement, and the multiple forms of violence that have determined its routes over the centuries, also enabled intangible forms of connection and below-the-surface entanglements that escape western accounts of history and of identity.
– Cecilia González Godino
Works that were featured and included in this exhibition
Lost and Found Gardens
September 10 - October 15, 2022 | Strathcona
MRG is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Santiago, Chile based artist Sebastian Maquieira in North America.
Sebastian Maquieira started working with found antique maps around 2018 using silk screening in order to emphasize his own pictorial vocabulary. From here, Sebastian expanded on his process by working with old antique books, dictionaries and encyclopedias. The exhibition “Lost and Found Gardens” comprises the use of these found materials that Maquieira then re-contextualizes, giving new meaning through multiple associations that are based on visual images and syntaxis.
Engrossed and fascinated with the knowledge and finesse that is comprised in these illustrations and identifying himself with the artists who created them, Sebastian began to collect those drawings, bringing them together, adding his own symbols in order to recreate a new place or a landscape. Each work contains a category of illustrations, such as nature, animals or human interventions. The marks added in colour represent the opposite of the encyclopedic emblems, creating a tension, a dialogue about the relationship between human intervention and nature; however, leaving the interpretation of the symbols in the works open to re-interpretation.
“Those drawings contained in old books come from a world that took place a long time ago and now seem like an obsolete way of sharing knowledge” says Maquieira. In a way the symbols in the works are lost and rediscovered by the reader. “Lost and Found Gardens” encourage us to return to a space of contemplation: Taking a step back at times when you are unsure about where you are going and looking back to bring a new clarity.
Beside his work with antique maps and books his practice is also based around objects, like the umbrella made out of a book. Those object-based works are more like a question: Is the knowledge presented in the book some kind of shelter, a refuge? The umbrella then becomes a metaphor.
Drawings of things
The ones that exist and the ones we invented
They mix like water and earth
They look like living promises
They touch without measuring distances
They turn their edges to show their other self
Thus attempting to insinuate its totality.
(Sebastian Maquieira)
The ones that exist and the ones we invented
They mix like water and earth
They look like living promises
They touch without measuring distances
They turn their edges to show their other self
Thus attempting to insinuate its totality.
(Sebastian Maquieira)
We had the pleasure to chat with Sebastian Maquieira while he was in town to install his exhibition "Lost and Found Gardens".
i. Name: Sebastián Maquieira
ii. I am an: Artist that works with images, objects and words.
iii. The name, date, and location of my current exhibit/show is:
“Lost and Found Gardens”, opening on Saturday September 10 at Monica Reyes Gallery. 602 E Hasting St.
iv. In describing the show in 3 sentences or less, I’d say:
This show is a visual dialogue between trades and crafts from different times. It´s also a love letter to all the things I find in the antique books that make my mind travel far and wide.
v. In the show, you’ll see:
Thoreau’s cabin, a fishing boat, old maps, all kind of animals, plants, trees and insects, a Ferris wheel, an escalator and multiples human inventions.
vi. The inspiration for this show comes from:
The nostalgia of these old highways of knowledge printed like beautiful ghosts.
vii. My past work includes:
Hinges, megaphones, dusters, kitchen knives, golden chains and black velvet to name a few.
viii. After this show, I’m looking forward to making a 1 month stop in Mexico and then going back to my studio in Chile to finish some new pieces of a series called “The silence of the Language” made of dismantled dictionaries.
ix. Anything to add:
Thanks to Monica Reyes Gallery for this invitation, and come see the show!
ii. I am an: Artist that works with images, objects and words.
iii. The name, date, and location of my current exhibit/show is:
“Lost and Found Gardens”, opening on Saturday September 10 at Monica Reyes Gallery. 602 E Hasting St.
iv. In describing the show in 3 sentences or less, I’d say:
This show is a visual dialogue between trades and crafts from different times. It´s also a love letter to all the things I find in the antique books that make my mind travel far and wide.
v. In the show, you’ll see:
Thoreau’s cabin, a fishing boat, old maps, all kind of animals, plants, trees and insects, a Ferris wheel, an escalator and multiples human inventions.
vi. The inspiration for this show comes from:
The nostalgia of these old highways of knowledge printed like beautiful ghosts.
vii. My past work includes:
Hinges, megaphones, dusters, kitchen knives, golden chains and black velvet to name a few.
viii. After this show, I’m looking forward to making a 1 month stop in Mexico and then going back to my studio in Chile to finish some new pieces of a series called “The silence of the Language” made of dismantled dictionaries.
ix. Anything to add:
Thanks to Monica Reyes Gallery for this invitation, and come see the show!
More Works
More Works
Sebastián Maquieira creates sculptural paintings (or pictorial sculptures) from a graphic approach that later materializes through mechanisms of object assemblages. In his most recent works, the artist incorporates objects of different origins for the construction of images where the synthesis of a structure made up of fragments prevails. The repetition of forms builds a total form, recognizable or not. In the drawings Made with chains and coins transformed by cutting operations, figures of a playful nature are distinguished: a volcano, an antenna, a circus tent. Another series of larger-format works in which he uses hinges and linen generate rather sensations of strangeness and sensuality. Maquieira's interest seems to be in the potential of objects to produce new signs, in short, in how an image is constructed: how we arrive at its form and where its meaning lies. (By: Artishock • 11/17/2015)
Billboard Project | Sebastian Maquieira
December, 2020 | Billboard at East Hastings and Clark Ave.
For our last billboard of 2020 we invited artist Sebastian Maquieira to propose one of his silkscreen on antique/found map works. The image he chose is so fitting and sums up so well the year we’ve had.
A horizontal laying human figure rests in a meditative state while crows circle above him, in the background we recognize an obsolete map.
This year we emphasize that the consequences of our acts do affect everyone around us; that we are all interconnected; that we are indeed part of the global village, that although borders can be closed down connections can remain intact, and yes, technology can be a life line.
Lots to reflect and wish for. At this time of the year when holiday cheer gets spread around like butter and good wishes for the New Year are the norm, we want to remind you that staying at home can save lives, that we hope for a vaccinated 2021 so we can embrace one another in the most basic way -- with open arms.
In 2003 Maquieira graduated from the prestigious Finisterrae University with a degree in Fine Arts. That same year he was awarded a scholarship to intern in the studio of Eugenio Téllez for six months in NYC. Maquieira has exhibited extensively in his native Chile most recently at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC) 2019/2020 "Los límites de la Tierra. 14° Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago" and also in Ecuador, Buenos Aires and London, UK.
We thank art collector Dr. Ricardo Roa for his support in the production of this billboard.
The billboard is located at the intersection of East Hastings and Clark Avenue in Strathcona, the same neighborhood where the gallery is located.
The Billboard Project extends the public’s access to local artists and treats viewers to approachable, yet thought-provoking contemporary art on the billboard.
A horizontal laying human figure rests in a meditative state while crows circle above him, in the background we recognize an obsolete map.
This year we emphasize that the consequences of our acts do affect everyone around us; that we are all interconnected; that we are indeed part of the global village, that although borders can be closed down connections can remain intact, and yes, technology can be a life line.
Lots to reflect and wish for. At this time of the year when holiday cheer gets spread around like butter and good wishes for the New Year are the norm, we want to remind you that staying at home can save lives, that we hope for a vaccinated 2021 so we can embrace one another in the most basic way -- with open arms.
In 2003 Maquieira graduated from the prestigious Finisterrae University with a degree in Fine Arts. That same year he was awarded a scholarship to intern in the studio of Eugenio Téllez for six months in NYC. Maquieira has exhibited extensively in his native Chile most recently at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC) 2019/2020 "Los límites de la Tierra. 14° Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago" and also in Ecuador, Buenos Aires and London, UK.
We thank art collector Dr. Ricardo Roa for his support in the production of this billboard.
The billboard is located at the intersection of East Hastings and Clark Avenue in Strathcona, the same neighborhood where the gallery is located.
The Billboard Project extends the public’s access to local artists and treats viewers to approachable, yet thought-provoking contemporary art on the billboard.
La deriva de los horizontes
Sebastian Maquieira at the 14 Bienal de Artes Mediales in Santiago de Chile, 2020
14 Bienal de Artes Mediales De Santiago, Curatoría: Los límites de la Tierra
The drift of horizons
The project The drift of the horizons, consists of the installation of a group of oars on the Lo gallardo bridge. This bridge was the last to cross the Maipo river before its exit to the sea. Today it is in ruins after it collapsed in the 1971 earthquake. The scene of the oars on the ruins of the bridge try to destabilize the gaze to activate reading layers that can mainly rotate around 3 axes: The presence of the oars and their function, space and context where they have been placed and the question about their crew. Once this installation, which is duly recorded in photography and video, is dismantled to be installed again in the Hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art, in the context of the 14th Biennial of Media Arts, where a new dialogue begins from the same premises, but in the specific context of the Museum.
The project The drift of the horizons, consists of the installation of a group of oars on the Lo gallardo bridge. This bridge was the last to cross the Maipo river before its exit to the sea. Today it is in ruins after it collapsed in the 1971 earthquake. The scene of the oars on the ruins of the bridge try to destabilize the gaze to activate reading layers that can mainly rotate around 3 axes: The presence of the oars and their function, space and context where they have been placed and the question about their crew. Once this installation, which is duly recorded in photography and video, is dismantled to be installed again in the Hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art, in the context of the 14th Biennial of Media Arts, where a new dialogue begins from the same premises, but in the specific context of the Museum.