Julia Aurora Guzmán

The term "liminality" was coined in 1909 by the Franco-German ethnologist Arnold Van Gennep in his research into rites of passage in different cultures and can be traced back to the Latin word limen, which means "threshold". Considered hybrid spaces, thresholds allude to a doorway, they open up the gates to the unknown and pinpoint the moment at which something stops being what it was to become something else. The very essence of experience entails stepping across a threshold as we leave the maternal womb. Stepping across a threshold means crossing the boundary between two states: sleep and waking, light and darkness, innocence and experience, life and death. Its doors are always linked to change as our only constant.

The interdisciplinary practice of Dominican artist Julia Aurora Guzmán (Santo Domingo, 1993) shifts between sculpture, textiles, photography and performance and emerges out of a profound exploration of the fleeting cycles of human life, with a keen eye for threshold moments. Her works honour births and deaths, leaning towards the present and becoming sensorial metaphors for the search for the centre while evoking structures of support that help us find sustenance in the physical, emotional or spiritual realm. Liminal is an exhibition that was thought out specifically for Pelaires, encompassing works from the last five years—from 2019 to 2024—in which Guzmán plays with her fascination with architecture using her skills for weaving artisanal techniques and universal concepts, to draw viewers along on an introspective journey that will give them space to explore the thresholds of their own existence.

In Guzmán's work, there is a recurring attempt to rekindle contact with the centre, to which she returns. Here, she moves to salvage the value of courtyards as an architectural centre and a congregation space to install her ceramic sculpture Navel as Vessel (2020) on a stone floor. This huge navel carrier connects its centre to the centre of the Earth, adopting a site-specific configuration in the gallery courtyard. The piece evokes the concentric waves that form as a droplet hits the water and, through circles modelled in clay, the ceramic vessel acts as an expansive receptacle.

In, pieces arranged in three pairs unleash Guzmán's diverse use of materials to give shape to two fundamental elements in her work: portals as a symbol of cyclicality and columns as structures of support. Portals open up portions of space-time that link up the different stages of life. These pieces sway, unveiling layers of meaning and material, (textile, glass fibre, wax, seeds), in a work of composition, overlaying, juncture. These are three examples of Cycles, a large series and body of works-in-progress that reflect a quest for constant adaptation, transformation and an understanding. In this case, (2019) opens up the horizons of the creative principle in a homage to the essential value of the seed as origin; Navigating through Patterns (2019) takes us through the central stretch of the path: moving forward to one day become, to turn-into, and Portal (2004) connects the thread of life towards its transcendence of the immanent. The execution of each of these pieces contains its own process, which takes up the (re)discovery of the human journey as a celebration.

Flanking the three portals, three columns protect them almost deities. These columns also form part of a greater body of work-in-progress which includes a large collection of interconnected pillars. Drawing on a radical interest in the structural functions of architecture, here, Guzmán brings together Navel Column (2020), Cariátida (2023) and Entretanto (2024), gesturing towards the vertical Earth-sky connection, towards stability and balance. A subtle space opens up from the giant navel lying on the patio courtyard, as echoes those structures that hold themselves up and sketch out a human figure at the gates to its own transcendence, aware of its inconsistencies, its porosities, its lacunae...

The last group of pieces is a showcase of Guzmán's fascination with a different image, the tide and water as an element: Nagori I (2023), Nagori II (2023) and All Together for the Sake of Processing (2019). The Japanese term nagori means 'the imprint of the waves' and alludes to the nostalgia of a cycle that's drawing to a close and the atmosphere of something that no longer exists or that which is yet to come. Using layers of textile and porcelain, these pieces make reference to the clarity of the new that can blossom forth at the end of a cycle: that which, once seen and understood, cannot be dismissed.

Thought out as a whole, this exhibition draws together the key themes and images in Julia Aurora Guzmán's artistic: the fleeting nature of life, systems of support, rituals and celebrations. Offering a diverse range of materialities based on manual work and crafting, these pieces laid out in an upward pattern from the gallery courtyard up to Cabinet call upon the viewer to be present when visiting the exhibition, taking in all of the In Liminal, Guzmán deftly weaves a visual narrative that is both introspective and universal, creating a spatial dynamic that invites the viewer and give themselves over to the interior voyage that each piece proposes.

Julia Aurora Guzmán
(Santo Domingo, 1993)
Lives and works in Barcelona

In 2023, she completed an MA in Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute (USA) and completed her undergraduate degree in Fine Art at the Altos de Chavón School of Design (Dominican Republic). She has done multiple residencies, including JOYA ~ Art + Ecology AiR (Almería, Spain), Despina and the European Ceramic Workcentre (Netherlands), with the support of Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds and Stichting Stokroos. Guzmán also received a Young Talent Award grant from Mondriaan Funds, has completed six solo exhibitions and shown her work internationally at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), Musée d'art à Charleroi (Belgium), Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (France), Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam (Netherlands), Art Rotterdam (Netherlands), Southern Exposure and Bass & Reiner in San Francisco (USA) and the ARCOmadrid art fair (Spain), among many others. In 2023, she joined the Chiquita Room group of artists with a solo show and is currently an artist-in-residence at La Escocesa, Barcelona.

(Text written by the curator of the exhibition, Laura González Palacios)

Galeria Pelaires has received a grant from the Consell de Mallorca and ICIB to realize this exhibition.