Ana Maria Devis
Bogotá, Colombia
April 1 - 31, 2019
Sponsored by the Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation
Artist Statement
The process that underpins my work is that of drawing and the construction and reconstruction of objects.
I generate a series of narratives, taking as my starting point the stories and personal experiences through which I explore the world around me. Driven by an inclination towards and concern about understanding my body in light of the intimate and the feminine, I begin with a series of preliminary investigations, in which I make great leaps, building and rebuilding objects, which eventually dissolve.
I consistently referred and still today address my body as site from which all of experiences originate, and by approaching it. I build different life systems functioning as referents to the feminine world. In earlier projects I also spoke of the physical body as a container but also as fragmented surface dislocated into electronic circuits and presented in objects which became the indicator of the presence.
In 2016, I was part of a group of selected artists which participated in a workshop titled “La Naturaleza del Cuerpo”. This experience lead to me to introduce the body as an entity connecting the two-dimensional work with the viewer. To understand my own physicality within a complex repetition of gestures to create large scale drawings, allowed me simultaneously to access a particular and personal experience with time and its unique relationship with the action of drawing.
“Infinito” (2018), the largest project within my practice, is the result of three intense years of research where repetition and movement are used to elaborate an intricate visual/graphic vocabulary. Due to the scale of the work, the accumulation of gestures, becomes either a landscape or an augmented view of a micro-organism surrounded by empty space or white areas, that metaphorically speaking, allow the viewer to travel between two related worlds: Topography and biology.
Bio
Visual artist, Ana María Devis graduated from the University of Los Andes in Bogotá in 1992. She studied gravure and four-color separation at the Camnitzer Studio in Lucca (Italy-1990). From 1999 to 2002 she lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she took courses in scenography held at the University of Sao Paulo, and later worked in the studio of J. C. Serroni, running productions of Bizet's opera Carmen by Carla Camurat and Hamilton Vaz Pereira, and Raindrop by Chico Buarque and Paulo Pontes.
In her work, Devis has tried to establish points of contact with the intimate side of the feminine body via painting, installation, photography, video and drawing. This subject matter is present in one of her earlier exhibitions titled “Sujetoalobjeto”, where intimacy is revealed through objects, normally enclosed inside handbags. Displaying these contents showed a clear exercise of evidencing complex systems of life and how subtle structures eventually reveal a previous unknown identity.
In 2015, Devis was part of the workshop “La Naturaleza del Cuerpo” directed by Maria Jose Arjona, and was later a guest performer for the project “Avistamiento” exhibited at “Flora ars + natura” that same year. Since then Devis practice, has explored the body as connecting entity between the two dimensional work and the viewer.
During the last three years, the artist traveled to the eastern plains of Colombia and the encounter with numerous turtle’s shells, that later were shipped to Bogota, transformed her studio into an archaeological laboratory. Using the inner surface of the turtle shells for drawing and expanding the lines into the paper supporting the shell, “La mujer tortuga” which is the title of the work emerging from this research, dealt with the importance of drawing as a vehicle to create a relationship with the outside (the viewer) and simultaneously generate new organisms. These drawings were created inside a vitrine at Flora ars natura as part of the “Gabinete” program (2016) and were later exhibited at “El Instituto de Visión” (Bogota-Colombia).
From an artist in residency program at Flora , Devis produced a long durational-drawing installation which encompassed an inventory of visual codes used by an African culture called “Palenque" located in the Caribbean side of Colombia. This Afro-Colombian community designed unique patterns and embedded them in their hairstyles to create escape maps. The meticulous observation of these hairstyles allowed Devis to understand the similarity with typological patterns of fingerprints and combine both instances of her research to generate a hybrid glossary. The entire process lead to a series of graphic translations which involved the artist’s body as a tool to create a drawing resulting from movement and repetition.
Artist Links
Website: www.anamariadevis.com
Instagram: @anamariadevis
Gallery: Galeria Sextante, Taller Arte dos gráfico, http://www.artedos.com