Artist Statement

Fiorella Gonzales Vigil's work is an exploration of how memory and imagination are activated through spatial experiences, interacting with the architecture or ornamentation of a building.

These spaces become installations, sculptures or objects that evoke uncanny sensations, which are commonly associated to familiar surroundings. Vigil is specifically interested in addressing the house.

There are three essential angles that Vigil focuses on in order to develop the idea of spatial experiences: psychological and physical states, reality and fiction and domestic and public places.

The first association to spaces Vigil makes in the working process is structural; that is, investigating the characteristics that comprise them and their corporeal natural (stability, strength, scale, etc.) All these properties can be applied to an immaterial level, to structures that are not tangible as well. The physicality will be a metaphor for talking about the mental configurations that we have built around ourselves and that sometimes start to fall apart.

In terms of reality and fiction, Vigil looks for sensory reactions. He tries to represent these two concepts not as a duality but as a harmonious unit, where the unreal is expressed as quotidian and common. He merges the fiction part with the dream world. Our thoughts and memories are consolidated while we are sleeping, so he strongly believes that dreaming has a key involvement when inventing this fantastical universe of imagination.

The idea of domesticity is the last perspective in Vigil's installations. He is intentionally creating private environments in public locations. Vigil's goal is to explore this paradox more deeply. Sometimes domesticity is in the subject itself - in an environment - but in more recent projects it is invoked through the materials and homespun crafts he uses.

Vigil's intention is to compose alluring physical spaces that can transport the viewer to mental spaces and let them escape daily routines enabling a drift in some other realm without distractions. There, he tries to subtract as much information as possible, just leaving subtle gestures to keep the signs open so the viewer can do the rest.

Another feature of the installation will be an amalgamation of the resonance of the space by itself and the sensation it evokes in the viewer. Vigil believes that in order to achieve this the spaces must be alive in themselves. Then, absence needs to be a presence too.