By Claudia Berrios
In In the Whitewater, her new solo exhibition at Praxis Gallery in New York, Peruvian artist Macarena Rojas Osterling transforms the waves of La Encantada de Villa into a meditation on memory, control, and fragility.
Some memories remain like a photograph. Others return like the sound of the sea.
For Peruvian artist Macarena Rojas Osterling, that memory has a very specific form: the waves breaking along the shore of La Encantada de Villa, south of Lima. A landscape that shaped her childhood and now serves as the starting point for In the Whitewater, her new solo exhibition, on view through July 10 at Praxis Gallery in New York.
The exhibition brings together, for the first time, a series of blown glass sculptures inspired by the force of water, marking a new language within the artist’s practice. Each piece captures the instant when a wave breaks and the whitewater loses control, transforming an ephemeral phenomenon into a solid, enduring object.
“It was the roughness of the sea at La Encantada de Villa, with the waves slowly devouring the shoreline, that made it so enigmatic. At night, it seemed to change, and from my window, the sound of the crashing waves became indistinguishable from that of glass shattering,” the artist recalls.
