Estefania Puerta

NADA House

8 Mai — 1 Aug 2021

GOLESTANI is excited to announce the participation with new works by Estefania Puerta at the third edition of NADA House—an international exhibition with more than 100 artists in over 50 rooms in three neighboring turn-of-the-century colonial revival buildings on Governors Island, NY.

Estefania Puerta’s compositions of dense and varied materials (both organic and inorganic) reflect her research and personal history of immigration and un-documentation in the United States. This inquiry has led to questions of psychoanalysis around what is considered natural or alien and what we identify as foreign or familiar; comforting or threatening.

Her work is made up of a wide range of materials to form new poetics of transformation and translation. Her practice is rooted in world making, border crossing, societies that do not fit into bodies, and creating an emotional language to these excessive shapeshifting experiences. Blurring the humanoid body with the environment, re-contextualizing mythologies, pulling apart the subversive nature of the decorative, and beautifying the grotesque are themes that often appear in Puerta’s work.

In her recent work "Receivers" Puerta questions human acts embodied by mythic forms—and their healing transmission. With a sculpture that consists of a root-like structure growing ears as its fruits, bearing questions such as What do we need to give? What can a receiver receive that acts as a healing transmission to the experiences that have left us wounded and in need of new empathic pathways? Who and what has sentience?

Along with referring to archetypes like the Mandrake and Sphinx as points of historic mythic access, she also echoes furniture design that feels simultaneously domestic and speculatively utilitarian. Through these familiar forms, Puerta embeds proposals for excess to be the site of comfort and to honor our complex unknowable selves that exist outside of capitalistic values of use.



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ESTEFANIA PUERTA (b. 1988 in Manizales, Colombia) lives and works in Burlington, VT and New York City. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2018), where she was awarded the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and a BS from the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT (2010). She has held exhibitions at SITUATIONS, NYC; Golestani, Düsseldorf; BCA, Burlington, VT; Yale University Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, CT; Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; 263 Bowery, New York, NY; New City Galerie, Burlington, VT. In 2019 she was a resident of Shandaken at Storm King Art Center, New York.