Artist Statement

Just as in petroglyphs, through her practice, Paulina Moncada uncovers subjects of landscape as containers of meaning, drawing questions about placehood and personhood while gradually reconsidering and revisiting ecosystems. Moncada works across painting, sculpture, and installation to portray fragile and inconspicuous encounters between human and non-human life. Her roots are planted in the entangled Andean Tropics, a place where absence and presence become signs of possibility. Tropical nature enters Moncada’s practice as a language of reciprocity, correspondence, and reverberation. Through speculation about the function of the artistic object, she invites the viewer to preserve mysteries instead of solving them.

Biography

Paulina Moncada (b. 1998, Antioquia, Colombia) explores time, symbols, and the semiotic landscapes of the Andean mountains. She investigates ecosystems as fields of meaning, maps silent encounters between animals and humans, land and diagrams, ordinary objects and idiosyncratic collections. Playing with figures that blend interior spaces that look like exteriors, or still-lifes that resemble astronomical entities, her work questions different notions of time, placehood, and personhood. For Moncada, painting is an atlas, where absence and presence are signs of possibility.