Luciana Abait

Luciana Abait was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is currently based in Los Angeles where she is a resident artist of 18TH Street Arts Center in Santa Monica.
Her photo-based two- and three-dimensional works deal with climate change and environmental fragility, and their impacts on immigration in particular.

Iceberg Series

This work invites viewers to reimagine nature through psychological landscapes that conjure alternate (or perhaps future) realities marked by adaptation and assimilation, isolation, and displacement. Natural landscapes and human-made utilitarian objects or structures are twisted, scaled out of proportion, or impossibly adapted to new roles where they coexist in a magical reality. The icebergs represent me as a wanderer - shifting between oceans and continents. Mountains, in turn, are metaphors for the hurdles and obstacles I have had to climb along the way since I departed my native hometown in the 1990s.

Images are sourced from personal photographs, shots of snowfields and mountainsides, textbooks, encyclopedias, and stock imagery, connecting personal experience to a collective geographic history. I work over the surface with pencils and pastels erasing the photographic quality beneath, and lending urgency to these emotionally charged images.