Maria Martinez Caņas was born in 1960 in Havana, Cuba, and because of the
revolution her family moved to Puerto Rico when she was an infant. She attended
college in the United States, and received a BFA from the Philadelphia College
of Art in 1982 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
in 1984. Subsequently, she moved to Miami where she lives and works in the
Little Havana section. Martinez-Caņas brings a sense of her own history
and past, as well as a fresh and experimental attitude to all of her work.
Her medium can best be described loosely as "photo-based" in that over the
last twenty five years she has used virtually every photographic medium
in realizing her ideas, and although her work is technically extremely elaborate,
the process never gets in the way of the forcefulness and impact of her
imagery.
All of these qualities are manifest in the Totem Series. Begun in 1990 and completed in 1996, Canas was inspired by the Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam in creating a series of spiky and swirling totems which contain images of pre-Colombian sites which are inlaid mosaic-like into biomorphic shapes. She uses a material called rubylith to create giant negatives which are comprised of the abstract components and negatives and printed as contact prints. Much of her work is carried out in an extremely large scale- up to 6 and 7 feet- echoing the mural traditions of Latin America, and yet they contain minute details and information which she gathers from her external photographing expeditions and brings back to the studio to use as the source material for prints. A collage aesthetic is central to her approach, for example her series Quince Sellos Cubanos/ Fifteen Cuban Stamps 1991-92 was inspired by gift of Cuban stamps given to her by her sister. She selected stamps in which the imagery inspired her own interpretation which again combines her cubist-Latin style with photographic images of Cuban landscape and architecture.
All of these qualities are manifest in the Totem Series. Begun in 1990 and completed in 1996, Canas was inspired by the Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam in creating a series of spiky and swirling totems which contain images of pre-Colombian sites which are inlaid mosaic-like into biomorphic shapes. She uses a material called rubylith to create giant negatives which are comprised of the abstract components and negatives and printed as contact prints. Much of her work is carried out in an extremely large scale- up to 6 and 7 feet- echoing the mural traditions of Latin America, and yet they contain minute details and information which she gathers from her external photographing expeditions and brings back to the studio to use as the source material for prints. A collage aesthetic is central to her approach, for example her series Quince Sellos Cubanos/ Fifteen Cuban Stamps 1991-92 was inspired by gift of Cuban stamps given to her by her sister. She selected stamps in which the imagery inspired her own interpretation which again combines her cubist-Latin style with photographic images of Cuban landscape and architecture.
Naturalia 2002 [view images]
Hortus 2001 [view images]
Diazo prints 1999-2000 [view images]
Piedras 1996-1997 [view images]