VISUAL ART BY ANA MARIA FARINA

histérica

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STATEMENT:

I paint with a gun—a tufting gun—along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, I conjure vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation. I am interested in the unconscious mind: what lives under the surface. I am attracted by the mystical, creature-like, mythological parts of being human. Stabbing fabric with yarn, my psyche cracks open into fibers. It’s intuitive. It’s cathartic. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s draining. It’s satisfying.

The resulting images are hysterical—in the truest sense of the word. Liberated from its slanderous connotations, hysteria is understood as a manifestation of the unconscious ferociously unbound. Ruptures are reborn as rugs, inviting the viewer into the home within.

Ana Maria Farina was born and raised in Brazil and is now based in the Hudson Valley, New York. She attended Columbia University and SUNY New Paltz for her graduate studies, and in 2018 she was awarded a fellowship to the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. Farina’s work has been featured in many spaces throughout New York such as the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, the Wassaic Project, the Garrison Art Center, the Dorsky Museum, Paradice Palase, Susan Eley Fine Art, among others. Farina is the 2021 recipient of the College Art Association Fellowship in Visual Arts.