NinaJohnson

Pushing around forms and the pictorial.

In notes she shared with me, Estefania Puerta wrote, “I don’t want the work to hold meaning in a way you can stand at a lectern and explain with more language. I want it to slip away and feel like a hopping fox in the snow, leading you somewhere but maybe not where you thought.” For her solo exhibition Horse to Water at Murmurs, Puerta has included footage from a wilderness camera installed in the woods by her house, a place where you might see a fox dart across the frame. This collision of Los Angeles gallery and familiar Vermont forest affects me in a strange way; to describe the spaces between them and the circumstances of their touching could take more than one lifetime.

Tracing how we can and cannot hold depths of meaning, whether through language, image, or structure, is one pillar of Puerta’s work, as are questions of transmission, time, and metamorphosis. In this context, it’s impossible for me not to think of a specific transmission: David Lynch’s Woodsman from The Return (2017) broadcasting his poem over the radio: “This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” We didn’t talk about Lynch in this interview, but we did talk about freakery and world-making, motherhood, and the importance of not explaining everything.

Rachel Elizabeth Jones

The first time I saw your work, in 2017, I remember there were two sculptures of stooped feminized mutants trudging through a river. I’m curious how you were thinking of the figure in Horse to Water.

Estefania Puerta

There’s a central figure to this show, so inevitably there will be an impulse to create a narrative. With that impulse comes projection and a desire to view proximity of materials within a space as a charged gesture that acts as a sequence or grammar. In my past work, I’ve pointed to a kind of bodily form, so I’ve been curious about actually imposing a figure to see how that creates a different dynamic and system of value within an installation.

Scale being shifted to this figure, Prop (2025), and how it plays a role in the overall composition became important to me. The other abstracted works aren’t representational, so it doesn’t really matter that they’re not accurate to anything in the world; but if this figure were a real person, it’d be a total fucking freak. The legs are way too long, and everything is slightly off proportionally. What does that uncanniness do in terms of the temperature of the show? There’s an off-kilter relationship we have to have with this figure who’s not quite us in a world that is not quite ours. I also used scraps of painted canvas as an extended pictorial space around her. On a formal level, I’m drawn to subverting and playing with the different ways that we can push around and mush form and the pictorial in the real world.

REJ

That sense of malleability and slipperiness seems critical.

EP

This show originally came from thinking about incubators and asking: What is the space between an incubator and a sarcophagus? It’s the idea of a container that has the potential to activate or bring to life and also bring to death. The container is a sculptural trope, and this humanoid figure can evoke a sense of being fed off of or of nursing. Those two ways of talking about it can feel really different. What does it mean to have an impulse to reproduce or to consider reproducibility as an art form? It harkens to so many sci-fi ideas around what it looks like to continue ourselves artificially. But then it’s done with materials that are very non-technological. They are props. It became an interesting space to think about future-mothers or future-parenting as a mythology and as a kind of “field of meaning.” That sort of dissolved a little as the show kept evolving, but it’s still in the space. The show is about a psychological domestic landscape.

Aside from the figure maybe being used for sustenance was the idea of the lone figure as a melancholic figure: a figure in a room that has to figure out how to make the world again. This for me is more to the point than the mother trope that may be placed on the figure or installation. There are authors like Clarice Lispector and Franz Kafka who have talked about being in a domestic room and having to go through existential questioning: for example, thinking about how big or small the room gets based on how I feel about myself. Do I relate to the lamp or to the clock? Am I the stain or the painting?

I’ll add that I’m not a mother, and I’m at the burdensome age where it feels like my uterus is the fucking thing that everyone wants to talk about. There’s such an ambivalence for so many people to decide on reproduction, and it’s not just a resounding yes or no. It’s a deep I don’t know forever. There is a kind of melancholy attached to it, a loss no matter what, but a gain too, I know. It’s a material shift, a distance and a closeness that feels like a gun to your head.

REJ

I don’t think I understood how weird it gets.

EP

Same. And I think that there’s something really particular about being a female artist at this age. There’s the mother-artist trope or the artist who purposefully chose not to have children, and her career is her children. And then there’s just me, you, and us being whoever we want to be outside of all the noise. This was a really important time for me to make this work without it feeling so loaded onto my personal self. I can have the distance that I want to have, and it doesn’t have to feel so autobiographical or declarative.

REJ

You showed me how a name is written in relief on Prop. What was your approach to text, language, and legibility here?

EP

I’m so curious about the push and pull within language. We can think about language that’s carved in as almost defacement, like when somebody carves into cement when it’s still wet or carves into a tree. Relief becomes so much more about the architectural, about welcomed adornment. Both modes have their own haptic quality with touching something that’s coming out versus touching something that’s been carved in. I want to feel my way through that and the difference in spaces where certain language is enacted. Where is language high, and where is language low? In the work or in the world? Who gets to have language and in what way? Also, writing something out is the act of drawing, and I want to call attention to that kind of mark-making and the actual activity of moving your hand around as a way to document the world.

REJ

I feel a sense of restraint in this new body of work. Can you talk about that?

EP

It’s been a hard show in some ways because I’ve been questioning how I’ve been making and thinking. I’ve been questioning labor as part of the work and how much is enough, and thinking a lot about the gesture and the idea of things becoming but not quite being finished. The idea of potentiality is something that’s been coming up a lot, both in terms of the figure as a potential for narrative as well as these works and their different states of being or becoming as a state of potentiality. What does that connote in terms of desire and the viewer’s desire for narrative or the desire to finish or make something be complete?

“I don’t want to have a bulletproof thesis or hypothesis that makes the show feel like a closed circuit. I want to have openings, and I want to create spaces that ask what it means to make your own systems.” — Estefania Puerta