TLP: Can you tell us about your latest work and what you hope to accomplish during your residency with us?

MV: I consider myself an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner, with my primary focus in visual arts and cultural research. As an artist, I create installations reminiscent of sacred spaces and material offerings. They propose relationships between forms marks and measurements – intending to diagram the visceral. I often work with ephemeral materials that are meant to expand and contrast depending on the space. I also spend a lot of time doing studies or drawings in between my larger projects. In my artwork, I try to create a visual network based on arithmetic diagrams. In essence, it is a way of chronicling and archiving patterns, and a way of examining how they empower and adorn space, the body and our minds. 

TLP: Without revealing too much, can you share a bit about your forthcoming solo show and the new work you'll be exhibiting with us?

MV: I intend to create a multi-panel installation inspired by ornate geometric Pre-Columbian designs. The installation will be a large-scale, mixed-medium wall grid made of modular geometric forms. I will make use of the palette and patterns I have found in my ongoing research of Incan textiles and material culture. I center my work and research as a visual artist on the historical and present-day connection between Indigenous and African communities in the Americas; the effects of forced migration, exploitation, genocide, slavery; on-going evolution, adjustments, inventions, and shifts in culture, visual art and language. We keep, modify, and adjust our visual culture to maintain and acknowledge our Indigenous and African roots through the abstraction of traditional systems, codes, and use of patterns. The embedded mathematics, geometry, and scientific language is imprinted in the rhythm of our textiles, speech, and organized spaces. I am fascinated with the infinite arrangements of these patterns in visual arts and culture. I am interested in contemporary science’s investment in the “abstract” and theoretical function of time and space. Also, the connection to astronomy, abstract geometry; mathematics and its use in pre-colonized (Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, Incan) material culture; objects, structures, architecture, and navigation. My art installations, drawings, and performance work reflect and respond to my research on how these patterns and rhythms interact and are composed.

I am continuing with my research in pre-Columbian visual culture and completing a second Huaca. Huaca is Quechua for sacred space; a space of veneration; an object that holds spiritual or divine charge that is meant to mark a place for contemplation and divine connection. I am proposing this installation as a temporary landmark, one that can theoretically be re-installed and re-configured in a variety of ways. This Huaca will function as a conceptual marker of place, one that illustrates coordinates of overlapping space and time. Offering a conceptual access point to cultural and ancestral symbiosis for Indigenous peoples of North and South America.

I work the layout and pattern of the colors into the overall sequence by creating studies and diagrams for the possible color sequences and overall design. These works serve as a way to chronicle my process and ideas for arrangements, palette, and installations. I hope to include some of these two-dimensional works in the exhibition to offer the viewer insight on that process.

TLP: What inspires you in this moment?

MV: My family always inspires me. Truth and reconciliation inspires me.