Juliana Cerqueira Leite explores physical space - the space her body takes up, the new spaces she continuously entering and creating as she moves. She seeks, through sculpture, drawing, and performance art to better understand and communicate these ideas.
To me, her most striking pieces are her sculptures, particularly the larger piece where she physically engulfs herself in her medium (image left). She makes the piece by putting herself in a giant clay pit and moving around - climbing, scraping, pushing, etc. The sculpture is a sort of record of her movements and the space she inhabited while creating the piece. Like Tony Orrico (
previous blog entry), her art largely is focused on her physical self/presence and abilities. But she also focuses on how this physical presence and the space we inhabit affects how we interact with other objects and beings in space. She discusses in a
Don't Panic article how our self-image as well as our literal physical presence "dictate how you interact with other people".
Making work so personal seems to give a distinctive power. To me, it comments on the limited range of our perception. Too often people focus on the intricacies surrounding them or running through their head, fixating on ideas of future or past events while ignoring the literal, visceral, physical, moment. I think that's why I'm drawn to artists that make their work a very physically involved process. They look at what's right in front of them and the fleeting states they exist in rather than more abstract, distant concepts.
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