El tiempo endurece el ser hasta la piedra

El tiempo endurece el ser hasta la piedra by Lucia Oceguera is the second exhibit of the exhibition program of Casa Santa Maria this 2019.

The contradiction, the contrasts between materials, the processes between the personal, the body and the environment as well as the flow of time, which collapses or progresses, are some of the themes that Lucía Oceguera addresses in this exhibition.

Using materials that dialogue in a constant tension, like clay that emerges from the earth mixed with zirconias that do not stop shining, leads her to think about different questions that run through her entire production: How does one reinvent the value of a material? Which ones intersect with the conflicts of appearances? What is it that we cannot see?

Going back to some of the work she did during her residency at Casa Wabi – Puerto Escondido in 2018, and in dialogue with more recent work, we find a configuration of multiple layers. Her work is not focused on the specificity of its language, but rather, seeks confrontation and confusion between the elements, traversed by a certain humor.

The artist arrives at the original and confirms that her activity is inevitably linked to the manufacture of artifacts, assemblies and paradoxes. Her pieces are a symbiosis between nature and cultural constructs. Thus, even the most valued material can be brought to its most primitive state and can be mixed with ordinary materials.

Her work´s aesthetics are based on the relationships between the objects, their configuration and meaning, by highlighting two aspects: the procedures, understood as a process of manipulation, and secondly, the materials themselves, analyzing their more specific qualities and notions of bodily presence, time and waste. The exhibition is in itself a collection of objects in apparent contradiction that through their process have as their objective to reach a midpoint, a balance.

The title of the exhibition comes from a poem included in the book So far so good. It is the last compilation of poems written by Ursula K. Le Guin, she explores the interaction between the soul and the body, and what can be known and the unknown. In her writing, Ursula K. Le Guin always tried to balance analytical thinking with intuition, she said that only when both are combined, it is when one arrives at a fertile territory, alive and that leads to new paths to the future. In the same way, Lucia Oceguera looks for that balance and explores that path between time and space.