May 2 – May 30, 2009
Steve Turner Contemporary presents Drifting, an exhibition featuring three new sculptures by Maria Nepomuceno, a Brazilan artist based in Rio De Janeiro.
Ini 3, the largest work in this exhibition, is a hammock, an invention of South American Indians. Although we think of the hammock as a leisure object, to their inventors, the hammock was an object of sacred importance, used as place for birth, sex, sleep, death and internment. Over the years, the hammock has become an essential part of life for all peoples in South America.
Nepomuceno draws from natural phenomena-DNA, umbilical cords, planetary Movement and cyclones-as she endeavors to balance such opposing forces as expansion and retraction, and tension and relaxation. Her resulting organic forms suggest internal human organs and a relaxing stay in a hammock might induce memories of one’s most distant biological past.
Born in 1976 in Rio de Janeiro, Maria Nepomuceno studied painting and drawing at Parque Lage`s visual arts school with Beatriz Milhazes before studying industrial design at the University of Rio de Janeiro and art and philosophy at the School of Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne & Paris and at A Gentil Carioca Gallery, Rio de Janeiro.
