Biography

Maria Ezcurra is a Mexican-Canadian artist and educator living in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has participated in numerous exhibits worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (Mexico City), Carl Freedman Gallery (UK), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and OBORO (Montreal). Maria has been the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the National System of Art Creators in Mexico and in 2019 was awarded the Prix de la Diversité en Arts Visuels by the Conseil des arts de Montréal. She obtained a PhD in Art Education at Concordia University and has taught art in several universities and organizations in Mexico and Canada. She has also developed and facilitated diverse public, participatory and community art projects. She currently is a course lecturer at McGill and Concordia Universities. Her areas of research are participatory art practices; dress and gendered embodiment; memory, identity, belonging and immigration.

Approach and works on display

Her creative process allows her to question and reshape the physical, emotional, and natural limits of the body and its relation to place. By deconstructing and transforming everyday objects, she explores and reflects on their personal, cultural, and social meaning. Her work is configured under a kind of archaeology of displacement and memory, embodying the multilayered relations involved in the construction of our identities. She works mostly with textiles, a rich sculptural material and performative resource, with innumerable formal advantages and symbolic possibilities. Clothes are a central aspect of her work, becoming a site of exchange and a form to negotiate a sense of self in relation to the world, with others, and with ourselves. With her recent work, she has been exploring ideas of migration and her own experience as a Latin American Immigrant woman, creating parallelism which revises and reveals the contradictions of the geopolitics of migration in the Americas.

Passing / Passant / Pasando (2020)

This installation invites visitors to walk around the space among flying birds. The comforting presence of these silhouettes contrast with the rawness of the deconstructed shoes that produce them. This piece incorporates both the resilience and vulnerability of migrant populations, exploring and revealing the connections – sometimes invisible and often problematic – of the migratory phenomenon with environmental, economic, social, political, and personal processes. Responding to the transboundary dimension of the phenomenon of human and natural migration, this installation revises and reveals the complexity of the geopolitics of memory, displacement and transnational citizenship.

Works by the artist