Artist Statement
Whereas photography defined my search for a “personal identity” in the 1980s and 1990s, for the last few years it has challenged me to think about and deal with the present. I have always understood photography as a layering process in the sense that collage and montage inspire and define the creation of a photographic image. I am interested in combining visual elements to create photo-based materials that expand our understanding of what an image is and what it symbolizes.
Process Statement
The last years have been formed by constant experimentation, working with different photographic and non-photographic processes that gave me the possibility of creating images without the need of a darkroom. This ‘portability’ is significant in my art making. With recently completed installation work I have learned not to fear a three-dimensional space even when I am working with a two-dimensional medium. The love and passion that I feel for the photographic medium and my curiosity towards its science allows me to experiment freely – always looking for new ways to expand what I call my visual-vocabulary. Living my life through my work, defining it, transforming it, changing with it as time changes my life. I see no separation between the life that I live and the work I create.
Maria Martinez-Cañas was born in Havana, Cuba. She received a B.F.A. in Photography from the Philadelphia College of Art and an M.F.A. in Photography from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. An artist who works with innovative, non-traditional photographic media, she has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, with 35 one-person exhibitions and over 250 group exhibitions.
She is the recipient of a Cintas Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts award; and a Fulbright-Hays Grant, among others. Her works are included in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco; The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; among others.
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