her rain: Lani Maestro

Using minimal and simple visual language, Maestro's work at Plug In ICA, Manitoba, Canada, addresses the complexities of human nature and dignity in the conditions of the social, cultural and political realities we experience in everyday life. Her works are poetic and powerful; they defy conventional interpretation. In the space created in her rain, Maestro poses an open-ended philosophical question: "how is subjectivity situated?"

With the installation entitiled No Pain Like This Body, Maestro transforms the entire gallery space into a large sculpture, with the placement of very minimal elements: a text articulated in neon, and its reflection on the floor reiterating a "mindful presence." she laughs, a new piece prepared especially for Plug In ICA, links all the works physically in the gallery space - a feminine reign of poetic resistance. These two works are accompanied by a third, brenda console, two animated text videos that act simultaneously as sculpture, architecture and body posing questions of positionality. Who is speaking? The work raises questions of subjectivity, agency and worldview that ultimately bring us to a coming to "difference."

Lani Maestro was born in the Philippines in 1957/ She came to Canada in 1983 and pursued an MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1989. In that period, Maestro's work was included in the Segunda Bienal de la Habana in Cuba (1985) where it received the Bienal Prize. Since then, Maestro has received increasing international recognition for her work and and she has exhibited widely across the world. Last year, Maestro mounted two exhibitions in Canada, l'oubli de l'air, in collaboration with the American composer Malcolm Goldstein at the Darling Foundry in Montreal, and "her rain" at the Centre A International Centre for Contemporary Art in Vancouver.

The exhibition is curated by Makiko Hara and Anthony Kiendl.

The opening reception is on Friday, 28 October 2011, 7.00pm and her Artist Talk will be held on Saturday, 29 October 2023 at 3.00pm.