Lina Puerta: Traces ... photos by

Lina Puerta is a Colombian-American artist who has an ongoing rapport with the cyclical evolution of natural systems and is fascinated by the analogous relationships she sees between humans and the worlds they inhabit. Puerta uses an array of found objects and recycled materials that are carefully chosen for the textures and colors that she considers key to informing her process.

Some works are like diminutive ecosystems, uncanny though lyrical. Her wall-works, however, appear as fragments of much larger landscapes in which the scumbled and peeling surfaces are heavily layered with lace, beads, and moss among a variety of other elements, a treatment that implies the temporal-based process of slow accumulation. Regardless of the format, the context of the gallery space highlights the delicate organic quality of her artworks having them seem like evocative souvenirs plucked from an unknown locale.

Puerta's most recent work focuses on the process of aging and decay in nature, and in the generative force that also allows for an accretion of new types of growth over time. "Nature is so omnipresent and magical," says Puerta. "Nature is the body and vice versa. What we do to nature, we do to ourselves."