MARIA ESTHELA

“How does distance look? is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless

within to the edge

of what can be loved.”

-Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

How does distance look? Is it the manifestation of an echo? Does it get weighed down by gravity? Is it obscured by shadow? Or fragmented by perception? There are, perhaps, no clear answers to the question of distance. In Resonant Matter, artists Naomi Dodds, Sofia Escobar, Maria Esthela, and Aline Setton venture into the threshold between places and report back what’s there. The works in this exhibition explore how migration, memory, and materiality converge through abstraction, light, and site, emphasizing the artists’ shared histories of migration to, from, and within Canada.

Influenced in various ways by the Light and Space movement, each artist approaches a visual description of distance through fragmented shifts in light, shadow, sound, and movement—foregrounding the body’s relationship to its environment. The artworks trace how personal histories of migration and cultural dislocation surface not through direct representation, but through an engagement with tension: between material and metaphor, weight and lightness, concealment and revelation.

Maria Esthela’s site-specific installations approach migration as both a natural phenomenon and social condition. 815 (Birds in Space) extends from artworks of an almost identical name by Constantin Brancusi and Liz Larner respectively, pluralizing the pieces from the vantage point of a combined perspective. Like Larner from Brancusi, Maria Esthela’s intricately hand-made copper work builds upon a shifting form that appears to be taking off and dissipating in the air, much like the movements of birds or monarch butterflies during migration. In M4C (Mother and Child), the artist activates a neglected corner of the gallery to reflect the immigrant experience of seeking refuge and transforming overlooked or unwanted spaces into sites of adaptation.

Resonant Matter reminds us that the impact of migration often lives in the unnoticed details: the shape of a stairwell, the feel of a woven line, the way sound bounces off a wall. Taken as a whole, the works in this exhibition draw our attention to the subtle ways that new environments are absorbed, negotiated, and remembered.

- Erin Storus

Photography by LF Documentation

Exhibition Poster by Maria Andreev

Collision Gallery