Esperanza Mayobre was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. She earned her diploma of arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2003) and Cabinetmaking from El Instituto Artesanal de la Colonia Tovar (IACT), Caracas (1999). She has participated in numerous group shows including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Bronx Museum, Smack Mellon, The Elizabeth Foundation, Miami Dade College, MIT CAVS, Museo de Arte (MARTE), El Salvador, and the Rich Gallery in London. She was part of the Skowhegan Talk Lectures Series at Artist Space and Proyecto TAGA, Colección Mercantil. Recently she had a solo show at Galería Fernando Zubillaga, Caracas, Venezuela. She has been awarded the LMCC WorkSpace Residency, the NYU Visiting Artist Program, the Honorable Mention XI Salón CANTV, the Skowhegan 2005 Fellowship, the Artist in the Marketplace Fellowship at the Bronx Museum, the Rebecca R. Joslin, and the Clarissa Bartlett Traveling Scholars Award. Her work has been reviewed at Bomb, The New York Times, Artnet, Arte al Dia and Artforum. Mayobre lives in Brooklyn, New York.
This work is part of an ongoing investigation of urban problems in cities as contradictory and different as Caracas and New York: where I am from, where I live. Living in continuous translation has lead me to address these problems in several different medias and ways.
In my most recent work I create wall drawings with graphite. With the simplicity and economy of a pencil, I draw structures that are in continuous construction and de-construction. The readings and meanings of my drawings are defined by the space where they have been made. In Caracas, they function as “elegant graffittis,” monuments to a city that no longer exists, a city falling apart, with infinite social, political and economical problems, a visual representation of its chaos and debris. In New York, in the context of Downtown Manhattan, my drawings function as the visualization of the organized geometry created by the buildings, the streets, the businesses, within the Wall Street financial collapse.
My process is very similar to an architect’s. With my empty frame foamcore models I create landscapes. I photograph them as sites, make blueprints and then transfer them with charcoal paper and pencil into the walls. Final documentation is done by using laser cutting machines as an etching artifact to make laser drawings.
