Laura Mosquera continues her fascination painting fashionable people in abstract environments, but the work in her exhibition in the deep end shows a more pronounced intimacy and emphasis on solitary figures in various states of intense emotion that was purposefully absent in earlier work. The lone painting included in the show was the catalyst for the exhibition, which is dominated by a new series of obsessive-yet-soft colored pencil drawings alongside her remarkably delicate graphite drawings. Still working from her own snapshots, Mosquera also takes inspiration from fashion magazines and movie stills. Her “…compositional device is cinematic, used in movies to suggest intimacy between a singular subject and a mass audience.” Christopher Knight, LA Times.
The artist states “the work is grounded in contemporary human experience, reflections of everyday life, exploring the representation of reality and the perception of what is real and its construction. While there is no linear narrative, there is enough information to suggest a mood enhanced by very specific titles that offer a point of departure for interpretation. The drawings and paintings are constructed with the use of snapshots. The work acts like movie stills, capturing moments frozen in time. Each piece evokes a nostalgic referential interior world. True nostalgia is nostalgia for the present; the melancholic awareness that the present is always what is in the process of coming apart, of ceasing to exist. In general the story is one of a sense of loss, of something missing, an intangible. Through each piece there is the idea of longing and searching for this intangible.”
Laura Mosquera (Guatemalan, lives Chicago, born Panama City1966) This long overdue exhibition is her second solo show at moniquemeloche — the first was in 2001 concurrent with her Museum of Contemporary Art 12×12 as their inaugural exhibit! In the interim she has had solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Spain. Her work is in such public collections as the Centro de Arte De Salamanca, Spain; The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Federal Reserve Bank, and the City of Chicago. Mosquera currently teaches at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
