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o Artist: Valeria Guillen

o Title: 3001: A Flower Odyssey

o Year: 2024

o Medium: Laser cut drawing on paper
panel, framed with plexiglass
and 3-d printed PLA plastic,

o Dimensions: 7 1/2 x 8 x 2 inches

o Description: Valeria Guillen, Columbia MFA '24 | Valeria Guillen's process-based and permutative practice generates a series of auspicious symbols and conditions that playfully ask us to reconsider language hierarchies, materiality, and humor. These seemingly familiar forms presented comically and absurdly are authentic to the issue they reference. Whether it is toilet paper represented ad infinitum (demonstrating the fallacies of late capitalism production systems) or an irreverent figure of a public defecator, Guillen uses humor in the face of collapsing societies that have equated amassing toiletries as a sign of progress. Reminiscent of the aesthetics of rebusque in the tropics-a process of defining a problem (or the solution to a problem) in terms of (a simpler version of) itself-Guillen taps into plasticity as an expanded attitude where materials respond directly to environments of scarcity and uncertainty, encouraging us to question their physical and cognitive potentials. Guillen's practice exists then not just because of the language of art but despite it.
- Johann C. Munoz

o Artist website or Instagram: https://valeria-guillen.com/