Perla Krauze uses found natural objects – like stones, rocks, and sticks – and preserves them by casting them in resin or aluminum. These objects are then arranged within objects and installations through sorting, stacking or suspending. The combination of the objects and the cast material and the way they are presented create an almost mystical setting.

 

Traces of memory and site become multiplied with cast resin in her recent explorations. The desire to preserve and replicate the unique forms of nature is visible throughout her body of work. Krauze´s gesture of replication struggles against the ephemerality of the everyday urban landscape. This most recent body of work uses the particular weight and translucence of cast resin to capture a reflection of the landscape outside the gallery walls. For example, the resin casts taken from cracks in the sidewalk from in front of the gallery. To further emphasize the translation of object and location Krauze has applied several layers of varnish to the original cracks. The outside world enters inside the gallery through this transformative process, a process that leaves behind the dust and grime of Mexico City and replaces it with the sweet smell of resin. The sweet smell and toxicity of resin can be seen as reminiscent of embalming fluid, in both form and practice. More precisely Krauze uses resin as if it was embalming fluid in a futile attempt to preserve and capture. The attempt to preserve and capture becomes essentially about trace, a personal one through the urban landscape as well as the traces of objects and time within the same urban space.

 

Everything leaves traces and the traces of the outside world become emphasized and abstracted to the point where new worlds, with new topographies and landscapes, are created with in the gallery. Her tools and processes of reproduction depend upon the traces left by the objects she wishes to capture. The transfer of surface to surface is very immediate and frank whether it is with her use of industrial silicon for molds of cracks in the sidewalk or her use of video as an immediate unedited trace of her movement through the urban landscape. Her videos of jacaranda trees, taken on frequent dérive throughout Mexico City, explore the trace of the artists eye and person as she passes through her environment.

 

It is important to note that the attempt is to not only recreate an urban environment but is also to allow for each object to keep its individual object-hood, as each object has become an even further rarefied version of its former self.