b. South Dakota, USA
MARIA (b. Pierre, SD) is a Guatemalan/American multimedia artist and vocalist based in London. She creates fantastical sculptural installations, performances, video and sound through merging digital and handdone processes. Her work is informed by her experiences as a racialized, chronically ill, queer high femme living through capitalist and imperialist climate change and technodoom. Deeply influenced by speculative worlds, storytelling, and the gothic, her oeuvre is characterized by a strong connection to the chthonic and political. With each piece, MARIA creates different universes based on alternate political structures and worldviews built on the ashes of empire. Her memories and bodymind with its endless potentials and failures serve as a conduit, avatar, and muse. She combines and remixes natural and digital materials to engineer and imagine radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks as sites for liberatory seeds. MARIA is also known for her work as both karaoke host and lead singer of the gothic dance band EVIL.
MARIA was formerly based in Columbus, OH and while there, was a member of MINT Collective. Currently she is based in London, UK and has completed her MFA from Goldsmiths (2022) and is the 2023 recipient of the Acme Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally with shows i know it’s the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery at CCAD and #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio in NYC and Oracles and Algorithms at Copperfield Gallery (2022). She also has recently opened shows in 2024 at Kupfer Projects and Studio Chapple (solo). Her work will be seen next at the Goodeye Projects Summer Show and at PILOT Gallery in Riga, Latvia.
Collaborators both part and present include: Samuel Barbier-Ficat, Casey Immel-Brown, LOVE-HIGHER, Lindsay Coffman, Dkéama Alexis, Dionne Custer-Edwards, Frank Joranko, Hana Ortiz Sanchez, Jo Snyder, Marisa Espe, Maritt Vaessin, Oriana Hirschberg, Torin Jacobs, Vanessa Walters, Valentino Stone, Francois Le Freak, Luce Taylor, Renee Xinying Zhong, Allison Balanc, Tiffany Wellington.
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