Mia Domenech Puras awarded the 1st Fine Arts Jury Honors Exhibition at PCA!

The Fine Arts Department at PCA recently created a new opportunity for senior students to increase their visibility and start creating an audience. During the end of the year critique, hosted last academic year in May at the Bastille Design Center, the jury awarded the best graded student a solo exhibition at the PCA Gallery.

Mia Domenech Puras, Class of ’23, is the first senior student to receive the award, she will be showing her work from August 28 to September 29, 2023.

Artist Statement

Mia Domenech Puras’s practice merges painting, sculpture, and collage mediums. In recent works, she experiments with combining synthetic and organic elements. She starts by printing images of Puerto Rico’s flora and fauna obtained from the internet. These images are then mixed with natural materials: ones she has collected over the years, such as shells from her childhood; ones that she now has at hand, such as leaves from the garden outside her studio; and others, such as vibrant pigments, translucent textiles, stickers, petals, seeds, and glitter. Hence, a composition of the materials is created; gathering once-unrelated images and objects allows a dialogue to emerge. Hot wax is poured on the assemblage, and the different fragments are now fixed and melded into one. Creating the compositions lends itself to a natural symbiotic process. The works mimic organic reality yet, refer to the artificial. 

Photomontages are created in response to her continuous research of Puerto Rico’s ecology, colonial gaze, and impact. She overlays two images that depict her country’s ecosystem. These newfound landscapes layer components that do not tend to cohabitate, such as fish and mountains, flowers and coral, and frogs and waterfalls. These images depict the silent interconnectivity that exists in nature due to its biological, cultural, and colonial heritage. Foreigners have been importing and exporting Puerto Rican plant life for centuries, dating back to the island’s colonization in 1493. She questions the realities in the ecology she grew up in due to the political and industrial repercussions. 

Mar y Sol and Quiero un Jardin | August 28 to September 29, 2023
PCA Gallery | 15 rue Fénelon 75010 PARIS M° Poissonniere

Vernissage | September 12, 2023