Cara Rae Joven

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My practice engages materiality through sculpture, video, and performance. I work with paint, fabric, rope, and constructed armatures, as well as my own body and the landscape. I often create conditions and arrangements that draw out the intrinsic qualities of materials. I am deeply motivated by the historical baggage materials bring and how meaning can be made and unmade in bringing together things like delicate fabrics and heavy-duty hardware. My work often draws from ongoing research on the Philippines, my homeland’s colonial past, and its impacts on living as a naturalized citizen in the United States. Colorful organza typically found on gowns, a paint pigment, or public land in the desert come readymade with relationships to labor, trade and use value. I collaborate with subtleties of light and color, gravity and tension, and allow these forces to act on the materials, spaces, and bodies. In my practice, meaning is made in the gestures performed to create the work, as well as the gestures of the work itself. While my research and biography generate my work, I am most interested in what is lost when experience is translated into form.

Artwork