Claudia Cuesta

Claudia Cuesta was raised in Colombia, educated in England and Canada, and currently lives and works in Vancouver. In recent years, Cuesta has gained an international reputation through exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, London, Birmingham, Bogota, and Rio de Janeiro. Her work is primarily sculptural, minimal in aesthetic, and incorporates common industrial materials that are re-shaped and finished by hand. Her artwork creates highly charged statements about transformation and transitoriness.

CONFESSION (from a payphone) is a dramatic installation that consists of eight wall works, a central floor sculpture and an audio component. Each of the wall pieces are boxes constructed from burnished steel that each incorporate elements such as a cross filled with communion wafers, an enclosed cavity of ashes, staring eyes, a burning flame, and a pink zipper. The floor sculpture is a coffin-shaped, human-sized steel box from which the sound of breathing emanates. This installation alludes to the passage from life to death and of the last minute chance to be forgiven for one's sins. While Cuesta draws specifically upon her Catholic upbringing, her ideas are directed more to society's construction of myths that have led to a pervasiveness of the concepts of sin and guilt within the western psyche. However, this work is not without irony and humour: the encased wafers that are consumed as a symbol of spiritual communion promise nothing; the eyes of God that apparently witness of our actions are slightly averted and the closed pink zipper, that with chastity denies the sexual being, is waiting to be unzipped. Cuesta questions the superficiality of confession as a means of assuring salvation and redemption and suggests that it is the result of our fear of the unknown.