EMU WEAR AT BERENICE STEINBAUM GALLERY

"Maria Fernanda Cardoso, a Colombia living in Australia, utilizes the National Emblem of Australia to identify with local culture. The emu, the national bird, provides Cardoso with a way to form an understanding of the Australian landscape and the means to survive within it. She explores the importance of camouflage, sacrifice and the intersection of defining symbols.

' Emu Wear ' is a collection of outfits that capture Cardoso's history of working with organic specimens formalistically, but still embraces the chaos of nature. The outfits create sense of highly stylized forms through visually defined shapes covered in emu feathers. The Emu Wear video installation, in collaboration with Australian artist Ross Rudesch Harley, of women wearing these emu outfits forces us to question the extent to which we dress in order to be fashionable within our world. The emu alters its feather color based on its location in the Australian landscape in order to survive, while humans form visual characteristics based on their social context. We modify our clothing just enough to blend in with our environment, but still we desire to stand out.

Cardoso's explores animals, who have developed a means of surviving. A ' Garden of Insects That Looks Like Plants ' is housed in museum display cases that contain various dead insects that use their ability to camouflage in order to disappear. Is Cardoso suggesting that these creatures have the intelligence to disappear from their predators? This work becomes at once a landscape, diorama, and a garden. The artist implores us to observe in this work.

Cardoso has created a very personal language that explores issues of form as well as humankind's complicated relationship to the natural world. Animals and plants enrich our lives, nourish us, and sustain us, yet we view them as expendable ".

Text by Berenice Stainbaum Gallery from the exhibition catalogue.