Christina Mesiti

I make sculptures out of containers such as envelopes, packaging, and gift wrap that circulate through my daily life. I try to solidify things meant to move and carry as a way of make invisible systems visible and bodily. I cast materials as a way to feel the positive and negative physical space created by these containers. Sometimes bits of the materials cling to the plaster, creating an ambiguous skin that makes the original object seem both present and absent. It’s a way of finding an intimacy with objects by trying to understand their spaces and the source of their shapes.

With this search for intimacy through presence, absence, and circulation of objects, I’m especially interested in working in a hotel room — a place loaded with similar feelings of transience, absence, and movement. A hotel is a container that supports human circulation. There is a sense of a paused movement in a hotel, a place where travelers come to rest, a place that tries to be familiar and but remains profoundly unfamiliar. I want to make objects that hold down the transient vacancy of the hotel and that foreground physical feelings of intimacy, presence, and absence.

 

For more information about Christina Mesiti, please visit her website.