Jose Urbina

Lives and works in Charlotte, NC

Artist statement

My work begins with what most people overlook — the materials we step past, discard, and forget. I’m drawn to the residue of everyday life: plastic, metal, wood, organic fragments. Not because of what they say about waste, but because of what they reveal about how we inhabit the world without fully seeing it. I form and encase post-consumer materials — granules, fragments, found components — binding them with resin into textured reliefs that echo physical landscapes. Ridges, valleys, industrial grids. Recognizable pieces of toys, electronics, and natural matter sit embedded within these surfaces, grounding the work in the familiar while making it strange. Over time a visual vocabulary has emerged that moves between cartography and geology — each piece a map of human presence as much as a reimagined terrain. The process is meditative. I think about how geography records movement and change, how the places we pass through hold traces of everything that came before us. I’m drawn to liminal spaces — riverbanks, empty lots, construction sites — where the boundary between the natural and the built dissolves. These are the places we inhabit without registering, environments that shape us below the threshold of attention. That’s what I’m ultimately after: a perceptual shift. I want viewers to pause and question how they move through and interact with the world around them — not just the landscapes they seek out, but the material environment they live inside without noticing. The...

Artwork