Forma Seductora
ON VIEW JULY 15 – SEPTEMBER 18, 2022
Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas
Curated by Tyler Blackwell, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator
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Maria A. Guzmán Capron creates fantastical hybrid figures that explore converging forms of identity, culture, desire, and social exchange. Her self-described “beyond-human characters” are made from vivid, often recycled fabrics and paint, which are stitched together to fashion sinuous bodies in various states of motion and repose. Often these bodies verge on abstraction as swathes of pattern and pure color are employed by Capron to represent a flopping, folding arm or billowing hairstyle. The contours of individual figures are subsequently lost, or melt into one another, suggesting an effervescent spillage of personality or emotion—whether it be joy, despair, lust, or introspection.
Capron was born in Italy to Peruvian and Colombian parents, before relocating with her family to Texas as a teenager. She graduated in 2004 from the University of Houston School of Art, and this will be her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Capron’s multiple, simultaneous, and sometimes conflicting identities (and geographical locales) inform the artist’s life and process. The layered textiles seen in Capron’s exuberant assemblies also speak to her interest in the ways clothing can signify one’s history, class, gender, and/or cultural identity. For the artist, fabrics can point to specific socioeconomic associations as well as aesthetic narratives.
Capron’s outlandish characters are meant to be seen as Brown bodies that reference her family and friends, as well as her immigrant, Latinx community. As such, the figures can be seen as actors in a quest for understanding and self-acceptance; Capron recently said, “I am a new thing and I want to signal with my textiles to other in-between people that they belong.”
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