Andrea Mato (b. Caracas, Venezuela) is a visual artist and photographer based in New York City. She is currently a BFA student of Photography at Parsons School of Design. Andrea examines the urban landscape through her unusual perspectives. She defamiliarizes everyday surfaces, creating a visual map that grants importance to the mundane. Her most prominent collaborator is the streets that she walks, where she photographs the remains of the interactions between living beings and the landscape.
En Limbo
While living away from my mother, she in Venezuela, and myself in Brooklyn, she was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. With this news in mind, I began to closely examine what I encountered on my walks that felt comparable to a diseased body and project my fears and hopes, which evolve concurrently with my mother’s correspondence and the tumor’s evolution. I feel powerless by not being able to do anything about her disease, not having the possibility to visit her, and not living this moment with her. I address this powerlessness by walking while reflecting on our relationship and creating photographs to share with her.
This project is about being an immigrant in the United States and being separated from someone I love when something tragic is happening to her. The project comprises staged self-portraits in isolated locations around the city next to detailed shots of encounters in the streets. The portraits’ figure is covered with black plastic bags about post mortem body bags and is in wide-open spaces to represent my isolation and separation from my family. The images next to the portraits range from a grimy concrete floor, pink wires that resemble an umbilical cord, or a plant growing through a fence.
To view more of Andrea’s work please visit their website.