Installations < Mirage by Nora Maité Nieves

2021 Terrain Biennial
Nora Maité Nieves: Mirage
October 2 - November 15, 2021

Opening Reception:
Saturday, October 2nd | 4–6pm

Nora Maité Nieves explores ideas about home and the sense of belonging we feel in the spaces we inhabit. Her paintings, drawings, and sculptures are made of multiple layers of textured paint and saturated hues. Her vibrant color pallet makes references to ornamental details from Caribbean architecture, especially to floors, wall textures, tiles, doors, and fences. The artist uses different techniques to capture fragmented details from the architecture like rubbing/frottage, masking, and her own process of tile making using resin and pigments.   

During the last year of forced lockdown, the Brooklyn-based artist spent hours daydreaming about nature and open landscapes. Windows became portals to the outside world. Subtle details enthralled her—like the peek-a-boo view into her neighbor’s yard, the way the moonlight filled her apartment at night, how the sun carved sharp shadows across her walls. 

Windows also became a way for neighbors to connect with one another despite strict stay-at-home orders. Window sills became vitrines, a place where neighbors could display supportive messages to passersby, expressing hope of being together again soon and showing support for the Black Lives Matters movement. 

The experience of the pandemic prompted new elements in Nieves’s work. For her installation at The Residency Project for the 2021 Terrain Biennial, she was particularly drawn to the leftover cutout shapes and motifs that are usually discarded in her artmaking process. In Mirage, the cutout painted shapes “sprout” up from the front lawn of residency house, like abstract flowers grown from seeds of hope. 

“There is a feeling of hope in witnessing a blooming flower and realizing the beauty in the cycle of nature,” Nieves says. “The installation also makes reference to the American tradition of festive lawn flags in the suburban landscape. As vertical cut-outs, they use positive and negative space to interact with the sunlight, casting playful shadows that change over the course of the day.”

Artist Bio

Born 1980 in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Nieves received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010, and her BFA from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas, in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2004. In summer 2021 Nieves was invited as a visiting artist at the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, MI. Recent solo exhibitions include: Deep Blue Day, Pink Bright Night at Embajada Foyer, Brooklyn (2021); Full Moon in the Sun Room at Fresh Window Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); Paisaje Lunar at Flyweight Projects, Brooklyn (2019); and Tangible at Hidrante, San Juan, PR (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: Electric Hue, Proxyco Gallery, New York, NY (2021); Surfacing at Ruiz-Healy Art, New York, curated by Carlos Rosales-Silva (2021); Contact Light at Survey Survey, New York (2021); [...]ENTREFORMAS, at El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR, curated by Abdiel Segarra (2021); Rubus Armeniacus (Himalayan Blackberry) at Jessica’s Apartment Gallery, New York, curated by Jessica Kwok (2019); Nada Tropical at Miscelanea Gallery, Barcelona, Spain, curated by Ricardo Cabret and Maximilian Juliá (2019); Small Objects at La Salita, New York, curated by Paz Monge (2019); Repatriation at El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR, curated by Bianca Ortiz (2019); and EDDYS Room at Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg, Sweden, curated by Austin Eddy (2018).