Woven Water / Submarine Landscape Agua Tejida / Paisaje Submarino 1994

WOVEN WATER: SUBMARINE LANDSCAPE AT MFAH HOUSTON

2015 Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art from Latin America. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH). TX, U.S.A. Curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez.

SUBMARINE LANDSCAPE: WOVEN WATER
White starfish, metal.

Composed of thousands of starfish, these constructions look like fragments of "woven water". Sometimes they resemble the undulating surface of the ocean, or like sculptural, three-dimensional "chunks" of water. I joined the tips of each starfish to he next one with fine wire, and made their form and configuration the result of an organic process of addition.

Floating in space, these starfish constructions surround the viewer to recreate an underwater experience. The smell of the ocean emanates from them, filling the room. The natural color of this animal, beautiful shades of blue and grey, remind us of the color of the water, from whence they come. The symmetrical star shape-- its symbolism and formal beauty often evoke memories of literary worlds of fantasy and mystery.

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Like a spiderweb or fishing net, Cardoso's spatial weaving captures the attention of viewers. We are seduced by the intricacy, scale, and odd beauty of Woven Water, only to potentially find ourselves uncomfortable by the aestheticization of a once living thing. As curator Ron Platt explains, “We are accustomed to viewing live animals in zoos and circuses, preserved animals in natural history museums, likenesses of animals in art. But aestheticized animal images are not natural.” Indeed, the starfish dance before us is made possible only by the death of these sea creatures. Normally starfish live on the ocean floor, using their tube feet to slowly crawl over rocks and prey. They do not gracefully swim or glide as in Woven Water, but languidly swarm and scavenge.

This work is unnerving not simply for its use of animals, but also because its overwhelming presence serves as an indication of commercial industries that allow marine animals to be captured, killed, bought, and sold. In creating Woven Water, Cardoso met with a surprise: buying starfish in bulk taught her that most—if not all—of the starfish she saw in the San Francisco souvenir shops were imported from Asia. in that sense, the eeriness of the installation is reinforced not only by the presence of dead creatures, but also by their commodification and a market flow that packages foreign marine animals into local souvenirs.

Within Cardoso's art—as in society at-large—the natural consistently is challenged by and succumbs to the artificial. What we value and what unsettles us about Woven Water are its manufactured aspects. Its arrangements, although natural in appearance, are built solely for human enjoyment and according to our preferences for certain geometric patterns and spatial relations. Likewise, our discomfort is possibly a symptom of a deeper anxiety about humankind’s impact on the environment. With growing public awareness that human activities are responsible for climate change, the contradiction of a water scene without water becomes
evermore impactful.

Excerpt by Michael Wellen, from “Maria Fernanda Cardoso: An Unnatural Dance.” in Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art from Latin America, 80–87. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015.

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The most baroque of its installations, "Woven water, underwater landscape" (1994-2003) builds an ambience total; it's a staging-both of the idealization and of the nature commercialization. As a controlled space, it evokes also the dioramas of the museums of natural history and subjective character, almost arbitrary, of its mechanisms pedagogical, which serve as an artifice to transmit scientific knowledge.

Carolina Ponce de León
"Inventario de curiosidades "(2004).

English