Coffee Table

A coffee table articulates the common area of the house. It can be a place for formal gatherings or a space for children’s play, which, with just a bit of imagination, can become a fort, a castle, or a cave. For Umaña, the coffee table and the objects that orbit around it are silent witnesses to conversations, celebrations, and mourning. These animated beings—imaginary four-legged animals—stand motionless in the middle of the living room, holding a bouquet of flowers. And yet, there is a sense that if you look away, they might change places.
Through installation, drawing, and textiles, the artist seeks to make memory and the passage of time perceptible through everyday objects. Her almost obsessive insistence on the coffee table is a way of understanding and grasping a familiar world and time that have already passed but remain ever present. It is an attempt to stop time, not with nostalgic intent, but with the desire to preserve something intangible.
Within this structure, where instability becomes evident, everything that causes discomfort—anguish, unease—everything that fails to find its place condenses into these bodies frozen in a gesture, like animals immobilized in the middle of the room, revealing the complexity of human emotions and the paradox of holding and caring when everything is on the verge of collapse.
Thus, the coffee table becomes a dog that is both dog and table at once, and the living room—the center of the home, the family, and society—turns into theater and farce.

Andrea Bustillos Duhart
Curator