| MARIA MARTINEZ-CANAS |
Born in Cuba in 1960, Maria Martinez-Cañas left the island as an infant when Castro came to power, and was raised in Puerto Rico. In 1978, she moved to the U.S., receiving a B.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1982 and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. She then settled in Miami, where she continues to live and work in the Little Havana neighborhood. Her photo-based work was the subject of a major mid-career retrospective held at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art in 2002, and has also been shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2000), and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk (1992). Martinez-Cañas’s work is preserved in numerous museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Miami Art Museum.
Graphically expressive and technically inventive, Martinez-Cañas’s photo-based images are personal and wide-ranging in content, alluding to her emotional connection with nature, history, her loved ones, and her native Cuba. In many images, disparate data and natural details are interwoven into intricate, multi-layered patterns which confound perceptions of depth as they deny the camera’s function as a record of the observable world. Experimental in her approach to the photographic medium, Martinez-Cañas has used a variety of techniques to create a body of poetic and visually compelling work in the tradition of Laszlo Maholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko.
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