Maria Elena Gonzalez: Un Real Estates

by Jerrilynn Dodds

Maria Elena Gonzlez employs industrial materials to create sculptural installations that are architecturally as well as personally informed. Her reappropriations of architectural symbols, blueprints, and floor plans allude to the political, cultural, and emotional coding of physical space. After a 1997 trip to Turkey, the artist began incorporating flying carpet imagery in her work as a metaphor for personal desires and experiences. UN Real Estates , the first major publication on Gonzlez's work, is a series of floor plans, of both individual rooms and entire dwellings, that together reference floors, rooftops, and welcome mats. Introductory texts speak about the unique experience and outreach that Gonzlez created at each exhibition site, while accompanying essays critically examine Gonzlez's works in the context of the visual arts, architecture, and personal ideology.

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 2004