Galerie Industra Art: Unsayings (Monica Mays) EN

The exhibition Unsayings (13. 8. - 10. 9. 2020 Galerie Industra Art, Brno) is a gathering of things and ways of doing that happen in the periphery of grand heroic narratives. Heroes are historically depicted with sticks, weapons and penetrating objects, but if you put a hero in a bag, he will look like a potato. In Unsayings, María Nolla (SP) and Monica Mays (SP) weave together other types of objects: handmade vessels, bundles and foraged goods as the protagonists of unuttered stories about carrying and caring. Monica Mays’ practice re-members and longs for home beyond anthropocentric relationships. She considers materials and objects through their production and reproduction - following the context they are “taken” from, through the cultural meanings they acquire, to the economies they circulate in. Her installations embody the vernacular stories of the objects she works with, where craft, lore and agencies meet. In Unsayings she draws from her recent residency at Rupert (LT), where she traced pre-patriarchal European mythologies about nurture, animism and harvest. These mutated as they traveled from mouth to mouth through multiple histories, both rooted and in motion - from Neolithic paganism, through Marija Gimbutas’ paranthropological research, to their contemporary context. Mays’ installation embodies the extralingual practice of these fables through a series of alchemical printing processes and deconstructed domestic items. Mays received a BA cum laude in sculpture from the HEAR (FR) in 2015, and an MA from the Sandberg Instituut (NL) in 2017. Since, she has exhibited and performed in multiple institutions and project spaces in Spain, France, USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Greece. Maria Nolla’s work is the result of an intimate relationship with organic materials and found objects that have scatological and abject presences in the sanitised urban and exhibition context. Through her sculptures and installations, she tries to create situations that present themselves as witnesses of time and organic processes, that certain systems won’t allow us to experience. She is particularly interested in the liminal space of decadence, bringing her work towards a delicate balance between living and decaying matter. She is currently investigating care, reproduction, empathy and recollection. Recent exhibitions include Looiersgracht (Amsterdam) 2020, Tilde (Amsterdam) 2020 and Digestivo (Rotterdam) 2019, and was the recipient of the GRA Autonomous Arts Award in 2019.