Dina González Mascaró: Vessels
Gonzalez Mascaro is a Canadian artist born and trained in Argentina at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata where she received her MFA and later taught. In 1999, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Centre for the Fine Arts and then completed a year-long residency at the Western Front.
Loyal to a constructivist and brutalist tradition, Gonzalez Mascaro has developed a unique, feminist, narrative that describes the mystical and metaphysical dialectic between mythology and corporeality.
The development of this body of work began with piles of structural elements forming mountain-like structures that could be broken down into spaces within. The structures are juxtaposed with organ-shaped vessels that breathe within these spaces.
Exploring an object’s shape, structure, materiality and how the interior connects or relates to the exterior, her vessels appear both like a cocoon where transformation takes place but also as open lungs, connected to the physical world, to the body - breathing a new energy.
The journey within these spaces and around these vessels describes the highly personal journey of the artist searching for understanding during a period of grief and loss surrounding the death of her parents and the ontological relationship between life, death and the body.