Leyla Cardenas

She received her BA in Fine Arts from Los Andes University and her MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Cárdenas installation, sculpture, mixed-media work delves into urban ruins and city landscapes as indications of social transformation, loss and historical memory. She explores reality through a sculptural gaze. For her, it’s inevitable to see the objects of the world as ruins of what they used to be. A parallel to the procedure of an amateur archaeologist can be made. She learns from her work by un-doing instead of doing, de-constructing instead of building. The materials she interacts with are literally pieces of a fragmented reality. What can she learn from un-doing or dissecting objects or surfaces from a specific place? What can she discover from items that allow a certain un-raveling of time? Is it possible to spatialize and materialize time? Is time weightless? Her research has taken her to understand how time and space are understood from an archaeological point of view. For example, she has used stratigraphy techniques. This allows her to correlate findings by their relative position in strata, as well as see materials as palimpsests, the fragments as humble documents where present, past and future times are contained and recorded.