But it seemed like I was making my paintings through my jewelry, and they weren’t wearable at all. Jewelry making is part of who I am too, and for a while I was working solely on jewelry and wasn’t painting as much. NMN I’ve always found them to be separate. Do you see it all as one process, or are they totally separate for you? Desserts drew everyone in it was like a point of communion with a group of people collectively wanting something. At the time, I was working in restaurants, so I started thinking about how desserts looked like paintings. Before, I was painting women and thought I was being critical of the exploitation of women’s bodies and consumerist culture, but I was actually just looking at it with the same male gaze. A friend was looking at a painting recently and said she wanted to get close and lick it. I also use resin with pigments and acrylic skins to create the tiles. NMN They’re a mix of pumice, molding paste, and fiber paste with pigments. MO There is something sensual about the texture and touch in these paintings. Like this thing is so physical, so present! This is how I started thinking about space and literally bringing the painting into space as an object. That has always stuck in my mind-how color lives in a tangible and intangible space, and how light comes through the color and activates it. When I was younger, my mentor, María de Mater O’Neill, taught me that color works in layers and to think in the space in between them. It feels a little bit like jewelry, like hidden treasure. I painted the stretcher bars first, knowing that I’d be able to see one of them once I cut through. I decided to cut through the canvas-thinking it could function in the same way as masking-which made me consider the stretcher bars as its starting point. I paint in layers and build a painting by covering and unveiling parts of it. NMN This painting, Looking at My Neighbor’s Yard, feels like a new direction. As I’m looking, I’m wondering if I’m supposed to be seeing that flashy gold-and-black thing behind the canvas or if it is being concealed. What about this painting where you’ve cut out some of the canvas? I like how the stretcher bar has a prominent role here. MO It really opens up how you see the work. A painting can be both, and I think of mine as both. Today, I feel like it no longer makes sense to think of paintings as either a window or an object. I even like when the painting process is visible on the edges through drips, layers, and fingerprints. The edges make the painting more sculptural, and moves you from the front of it to its sides. Nora Maité Nieves Painting the edges makes it clear that it is an object because it gives it a continuity. When I was younger, people would discourage that because it turned the painting into an object, but that never seemed like a bad thing. Margaux Ogden I appreciate how you carry the painting around the edges. We met in her Greenpoint, Brooklyn, studio to discuss her current exhibition, Full Moon in the Sun Room. While there are moments in the paintings that reference the named world-body parts, botany, concrete breezeways-her practice is foremost a love letter to a practice of abstraction that is carefully considered and courageous, but also intuitive. The resulting works are materially seductive and in the thrall of both social and personal memory. Nora Maité Nieves paintings sieve through systems of contemporary abstraction the architectural nuances of her childhood in Puerto Rico and the spirit of the recent protests there.
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