Now Representing: Selva Aparicio

ENGAGE Projects is proud to announce the representation of Selva Aparicio, an interdisciplinary artist bridging the disciplines of sculpture, installation, fibers and performance. A collector of discarded objects, Aparicio’s praxis explores ideas of death, transition, and the fragility of life using materials that defy their innate mortality. Aparicio received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, followed by her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2017.

“I work between death and decomposition, expanding that moment, slowing the process of decay.”

Aparicio draws heavily on her upbringing in the woods outside Barcelona, an early life marked by the freedom and resourcefulness afforded by the natural world around her. Equally defined by the violence of familial instability, Aparicio sought solace in handicrafts and classical piano amongst a community of proto-hippies as a young child. Her unique niche in the art world is heavily informed by these early ventures, often taking thematic shape in the paradox that is beauty. Working with nature’s ephemera, including insect wings, fallen leaves, oyster shells, and human cadavers, her pieces are extended death rituals that foreground a reverence for the deceased and discarded. She reflects, “I work between death and decomposition, expanding that moment, slowing the process of decay.” These materials, caught in physical and spiritual limbo, inspire her practice and allow her to present their reimagined forms not as entombments but as moments that hold space and time to reckon with life, death, transition, and mourning.

Aparicio’s work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art; Can Mario Museum, Spain; CRUSH Curatorial, New York; Roots & Culture, Chicago; The Kyoto International Craft Center, Japan; Instituto Cervantes, New York; and the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona. She was awarded the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights in 2016, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize in 2017, and received a MAKER Grant from the Chicago Artist Coalition in 2020. She was also named one of the 2020 breakout artists in Chicago by NewCity Art and was an artist in residence at BOLT through the Chicago Artists Coalition. Aparicio was most recently named one of three Artadia 2022 awardees in Chicago.

Edra Soto's Group Exhibition at the Whitney:

no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

Congratulations Edra! Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria, no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on November 23, 2022. The category four storm devastated Puerto Ricans in September of 2017 with a death toll of 4,645 people. Along with the existential threats of the events that followed, including the implementation of La Junta, the protests of Verano del 19, a series of earthquakes, and the Covid-19 pandemic, Hurricane Maria and the years that followed was a time of extreme hardship for Puerto Ricans. The Whitney offers no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria as a platform for Puerto Rican artists “and the ways they have forged paths through the wake of these legacies.” Click here to find out more about the show.

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