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Test Site: “Just think how we are constantly engaged with earthly heavens when we walk, how in fact everything we do with our limbs is connected with the Earth.”
Erica Mahinay
2021
Test Site: “Just think how we are constantly engaged with earthly heavens when we walk, how in fact everything we do with our limbs is connected with the Earth.”, 2020
Raw pigment and acrylic on silk 72 inches x 83 inches
The artistic practice of Erica Mahinay (1986) is founded on the interrelation of time, perception and the body, the main subjects of painting located on the ridge between abstraction and figuration and the physical and mental aspects of the work. Using her hands, the Los Angelesartist lends her paintings a gestural component, which she envelops with meanings tied to reflection on the emotional aspects of perception. As observed by Francesca Gavin, Mahinay’s work is rooted in a range of disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience. And so, her works of art are abstract and rooted in the expression and demonstration of our capacity to experience life in all its complexity. For the Frescobaldi Prize, Erica created the painting Test Site (Just think how we are constantly engaged with earthly heavens when we walk, how in fact everything we do with our limbs is connected with the Earth). A work inspired by her impressions of the CastelGiocondo estate, part gained through direct experience, part filtered and interpreted through Rudolf Steiner’s theory of agriculture. Created out of a thousand colorful fingerprints, the work is a collection of traces that seem to create a sparkling landscape, where every touch is an act filled with care and attention, almost a tender act of cultivation for painting that emerges from and is nourished by first-hand experience.
The Artist
Erica Mahinay
Erica Mahinay 1986, Santa Fe, USA Erica Mahinay is an American artist whose artistic practice moves between painting and sculpture. In her work she explores the psychological and emotional weight around the interpretation of "home". Her works relate to the concept of familiarity of the home to explore notions of nostalgia, displacement, truth, self-deception and perseverance. By combining a variety of materials, Mahinay produces clues that are a sense of familiarity, but in a way that is more mysterious. Dense layers of delicately colored paint and parts of it torn away act in conjunction with found objects and painted representations to create a visual game between history and invention, dreams and memory, and between the past, the present and the future. Her works manifest a contemporary condition in which composing and redefining the self becomes the center of her investigation. Born in Santa Fe, USA in 1986, she obtained a B.F.A. in Art at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2008 and has reached M.F.A. at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2013.
The main solo shows include:
Lyles & King, New York (2017), Ibid Gallery, Los Angeles (2016), Fused Space, San Francisco, a cure by Jessica Silverman (2015), T293, Naples, IT (2014).