Who am I?
Maria Barrientos is an artist working and living in Fort Worth, TX. She received her MFA at the SUNY at Buffalo in Buffalo, NY. She received her BFA from Texas Christian University in Studio Art with an emphasis in New Media in 2019. Barrientos’s work has been included in various exhibitions, most recently at the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY, CICA Museum in South Korea, and in the Latin American Contemporary Fine Art Competition hosted by Agora Gallery in New York City, 30 Under 30 at Viridian Artists Gallery in New York where she exhibited laser etchings, photographs, and 3D modeled renders among other works.
Barrientos works as a bilingual Gallery Teacher at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and is a freelance artist educator for public programs at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Artist Statement
Barrientos' art is multi-media based. She uses video, animation, photography, 3D modeling, and 3D printing to explore themes of time and space, where the viewer experiences a dreamscape or liminal space. Duality and ephemera are themes used to question reality in the in-between spaces of nostalgia that the work creates. Barrientos explores between dreams and reality as a way to examine stages of consciousness. She creates immersive interactive spaces that trigger not only personal memories but also a universal nostalgia. Barrientos' works represent the point in time between life and death to question our human existence that conjures the feeling of wonder and confusion. In her work, she contemplates the possibilities of then, now and the unknowable beyond, how people interact through world-building in virtual or real spaces, that generate empathy to provoke entropy. Virtual spaces allow her to build worlds that would otherwise not exist, comprehend mortality, and question ideas about superstitions that create stories that seek not to be forgotten. The use of playful colors and textures expresses dark themes lightheartedly that look deeper into the meaning of our human existence. Barrientos' work invites the viewer to explore and be curious about the journey to discover more of the unknown.