MAVA

You may notice the particular shape of Mava titled 'The Problems.' Since 2014, he's created over a thousand lollipops using materials ranging from roofer nails to polymer clay, often adorned with acrylic paint or textiles. His experimentation knows the potential, from resin coatings to filament sculptures fashioned with a heat pen, molded plastics, embellishments, and abstract forms. Through his work with 'The Problems,' Mava believes he captures something profound.

But why 'The Problems'? Reflecting on his life, Mava is touched by his many challenges—oppressions, discriminations, crises, rejections, barriers, retaliations, and the list stretches on like chapters in a novel. Yet, he has survived them all, and they've shaped him into who he is today. 'The Problems' symbolize our adversities, whether too many to count or too few to mention. They're not burdens to discard, yet they're challenges to conquer, reflections of our past and emphasize the strength we've grown. So, take a moment to reflect on your own 'problems". How many you've confronted and conquered—and see them not as scars but as marks of beauty?

My obsession pieces, with heavy adoration of sequins, and beads. The miniature drawings using images from my Tumblr. 

The adoration is made of embellishment with sequin and beads of couture touches with a diversity of colors & form. Its special feeling in creating opulent embroidery requiring countless hours of work with exceptional skills. Being like a magpie with an adornment to sparkle.

  Tumblr is a blog tool or microblogging tool. Where everyone can share themselves. Each user has his or her own Tumblrlog where they can publish short posts of text, images, quotes, links, video, audio and chats. I was obsessed with the various images.                                                                            

   Therefore I translated it through drawings on the medium called shrinky dinks- which are large flexible polystyrene plastic sheets which, when heated in an oven, shrink to small hard plates without altering their color or shape.

   It represents my obsession of embellishment and drawings from Tumblr.   I added the rotating mirror ball motors with a few sculptures.  I set up  a new boundary between the viewers and sculptures. Because my work emphasizes heavily on spatial tactile.  It causes the viewers to sense a temptation to touch it.  The opportunity gives the viewers the ability to observe my work with 360 degree perspective without contact. It may or may not be effective.

          I often feel sorry for people who hear.  They miss so much! There is so much to be found in silence, and hearing people don’t have much silence!

There once was silence. You could pass through a forest to find it, or just go out in your backyard.  You could hear all the little living things.  

          Now there are so many distractions… many buildings, traffic, road construction, boom boxes, amps—noise is everywhere.  You know what people say, “I can’t hear myself think!” Everyone wants to hear only what they want so they’ve got headsets on when they go for a walk or run and they screen out anything else.  They don’t listen to the resonance of life around them.

         “He can’t hear” doesn’t really describe me.  You have to know how to call--then I will come! 

          If I had been hearing I would have learned from my parents speaking my name.  I would have learned that a particular group of sounds meant me.  But I never learned that.  What I learned was, when a light flashed on and off, it was my father calling me!

         Or maybe he stomped on the floor or banged on a door or wall.

         The floor would resonate and I would feel the resonation in the next room.  I would know my father wanted me, urgently.  And I would come.

          I often wondered why people would say, “I’m sorry” when I tell them I am deaf.  Why are they sorry?  Sorry for what?  

Are you ready to learn how to summon a person like me?  

          I created my sculptural forms with the intent that they move and have resonance.  Living things move and vibrate and create resonance.  This is how we know when something or someone is dead or alive.  A peculiar quietness descends when life departs.  A dead, unmoving silence.  I do not possess dead silence because I am alive, and my body vibrates within its space constantly, creating resonance, just as your body does, just as everyone’s body does. The heart is not still but throbs resonantly within everyone living.

          Dead silence, live motion.  I create my sculptures to summon to you like my father stomping on the floor.  My sculptures are light, sheer.  They have shadows and nuances.  They are susceptible to movement around them, air currents, and the fall of light. The viewer sees and feels the motion, and senses the sound through the resonance pervading the space.  It’s an utterance that speaks indelibly to us all. 

 It is the eloquence of resonance.

Chiffon communicates. It breathes and flows. It is secretive yet revealing. It suggests, transforms, vibrates in response to stimuli, it utters, gestures, evokes, metamorphoses. It also embellishes, transcends, summons impressions of great vulnerability and whispers of impeccable beauty and serenity, half-hidden, half-disclosed. Chiffon clothes, sometimes, arms and bodies that put language to uses we don’t always suspect. When it does so, chiffon enhances those forms as if it wished to make disclosure or to clarify the message.

Words are applicable to vision. Words create beauty just as sound does, and vision activates these qualities via perception. 

My use of translucent materials such as sheer fabrics is an attempt to portray my vulnerability in communication situations. I use colors that convey or suggest the presence of skin or the condition of nudity, and thereby, vulnerability.

But the suggestion of skin also summons a sense of the lack of gestural language, which is inevitably associated with hands, and necessarily associated by the quasi-intimate. Too often, hands resort to writing with me, and I observe from a great distance. The hands scribble on paper, and eye contact is lost as the hands rummage for paper, the essential eye contact fades and my interest in the portraits eviscerated.

Likewise, the various escapades I made into wall sculptures, predominantly welded metal framework, with stretched chiffon all incorporating an array of figurative work that suggests the transformation between chiffon and steel. I found time on my hands; it showed an inclination to fill the empty moments by embellishing the anecdotes. It showed my attempt to satisfy my craving for full access to communication by creating visual dazzle and force.

The adornment on the chiffon arranged consciously, to read the movement by the effect of dazzling light among the sculptures on the wall: the shadows of the sculpture became a new emphasis

The chiffon stretched over fastens onto the welded metal framework. It represented a purely formal analyze to question myself the status of flatness. The feeling of chiffon conveys through its sheer transparency. Seeing through the fabric. Chiffon suggests vulnerability underscores delicacy. The color of chiffon show the presence of skins or flesh to summon a sense of mystery and the erotic: the hidden the not-often-seen and sense of different meaning: fashion, fog, urge, and translucent.

I sensed with myself to pursuit of beauty.  I start with a feeling within myself, what might be called an inspiration a feeling needing to represent itself. The excitement builds to paint, sew, and evince something that evolves to satisfy my goal of beauty. The wall I created with pins assemblage and at the moment it could be the ephemeral with a reaction.  Meanwhile it enchants the natural pleasure was to watch it scattered into the diagram.  The pins became the individual of it own.

My approach is vigorous yet searching; mysterious yet positive, buoyed by brilliant and eclectic hues, glitter, and a cosmopolitan vibe for my yearning for a meaning. 

All the photos in this template are taken by Manuel Vazquez

       In my work I sometimes appropriate a range of materials and fabrics (like chiffon and rayon) into something that references the tradition of painting on canvas but upends or thwarts the traditional… the fabric is sheer allowing light to shine through, and the transparent quality allows for the layering of multiple images and luminescent effects.

       I have a series of works that explore the Rorschach or inkblot test, which is a psychological test where a subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning, or to identify whether someone has thought disorders. I re-contextualized this test to explore perception and how it relates to communication in lip-reading. I was born deaf which in effect has made me rely even more heavily on and be more sensitive to the visual experience. Within the deaf community sometimes people that can lip read are considered to be not deaf enough. Due to lip reading’s controversial aspects, and that it is so widely used by people losing their hearing, I think it is quite an interesting topic for further investigation 

All the photos in this template are taken by Manuel Vazquez.