This exhibition engulfs the viewer – A horned figure of sculptured cloth hovers in the corner, double-sided paintings suspend like portals from the ceiling, lovers morph and bleed one into the other across a wall of six paintings of red-mirrored acrylite, while in a rear room works on vellum drift in a sea of blue.

There’s a strange intimacy to the way these pieces blur images of origin, death, and desire. A man-of-war floats on an organza river of life, a radiolaria of cut mirrored plexiglass glows red, on the floor at the viewer’s feet a delicately sewn skeleton of a creature crawls as if out of a dream.

I am interested in using paint and transparent materials to create multi-layered compositions that, through a play with light, reflection, and shadow, explore simultaneity of image and emptiness. I have also taken some work off the wall and foregone the opacity of the traditional canvas. They now suspend or sit in the center of the room like a portal.

I stretch both sides with transparent voile and add an acrylic insert to create three layers on which I paint, print and etch. Each layer interacts with the others, weaving a complex composition of images, shadows, moiré and reflections.

My work transforms the human body into a magical realist vessel for embodying archetypes of death, desire and our collective unconscious –those very things that make us most human and most enigmatic. In response to a predominantly male depiction of sexuality throughout art history, as a woman I want to depict sexuality and sensuality from a feminine perspective. Rejecting the traditional opacity of the canvas, I employ voile to unveil the complexity of our ephemeral nature.

Ana earned her MFA from Columbia University and has shown around the world.