After 40 years of living in Australia Mariana returned to the country of her birth Ecuador, where the past seemed more present and accessible to her. She was struck by the formality of the retelling of her family’s history, of the suited ghosts who stepped out of the shadows to confront her. Within this exhibition she explores her past, the sense of anonymity in a crowd and our collective excesses as consumers. She emphasizes the commonness of human fate, the painful burden of loss, and how incomplete we feel when we stand in judgment of each other.
Neons have become an important component in her recent installations; they represent the blinking lights of the city/urban consumer culture. We are bombarded by manipulated language and slogans; a numbing banality used to trivialize the human experience. In analysing this condition, she is in fact analysing herself. What is discarded and what is saved is always a reflection of how society and the individual value the materials. By reusing materials that embody people’s experiences Mariana has come to a stronger awareness of the stories and the history carried in the materials themselves. This body of work is also heavily influenced by Francisco Goya's (1746-1828) Los Caprichos(1799) and Oswaldo Guayasamin (1919-1999), commentaries on social inequalities.
