that is ever-expanding. It speaks directly to an existence of a shifting and elusive reality that can never be captured.
Understanding symbols to be projections of larger concepts and patterns of human existence in visual form, Palazio views shadows as projections of physical objects, using them in works to expand sculptures between the physical and the metaphysical. Interested in how the shadow can speak to religious experience through its physicality, the works originate in light (the divine) and end in amorphous shapes (the feeling within).
Using cane weaving to create spaces of Latin American religiosity, the artist’s recent body of work reclaims the medium and makes it specific to Nicaraguan culture. Cane weaving came to the Americas in the 1650s through England, since it was used to create furniture that could withstand the hot and humid climates, unlike the upholstery typical to Europe at the time. It took root in the United States, and evolved into wicker furniture, but in the rest of the Continent, the technique has remained the same for centuries. The weave pattern in Nicaragua has its own name, ojo de pollo, or chicken eye, since every other square makes an eye-like shape. Through interventions within the weave with wire, beads, and string, the artist uses the weave as a gridded canvas to adorn with colors and materials familiar to churches in Nicaragua, building upon the naming of the weave to create a specifically Nicaraguan object.
The radio station, as an ephemeral space of information transmitted through unseen waves, tunes into a specific frequency filled with information. In the moments of lapse in between, or when the space is empty, what results is an audible static, an abyss. Exploring this static through drawing and re-fashioning it to communicate illumination of the divine during a religious experience, Palazio is interested in layering the spatial experience with an audible static.
This, in conversation with Palazio’s design work that collects and re-organizes the everyday, points to the artist’s interest in constructing systems of meaning that reveal how the sacred emerges through everyday materials, cultural memory, and sensory experience.
Incorporating cane weaving, shadow and frequencies to create a space of Latin American religiosity, the artist’s work embodies a powerful, irrational and transcendental nature.
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KARE.PALAZIO@YALE.EDU
My personality, in art form: