Working between Mexico and New York, Amaya is a visual artist whose practice moves across installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography. Her work explores the neurological and emotional points that emerge within human relationships, as well as the shifting territories of intimacy and identity.With a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad de Guadalajara, Amaya later specialized in mixed media at the Art Students League of New York and participated in the Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program at the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her practice is grounded in an ongoing contemplation of existentialism and the modern world, which she approaches through a language that is often simple, direct, and literal.Words play an important role in her work, frequently existing alongside images and objects as a way of opening another layer of meaning. Titles become clues, allowing language to guide the viewer toward the work rather than simply describe it. Materials, meanwhile, carry their own histories and associations, becoming part of the conversation.Her work has been presented internationally, including through her selection for the El Paso Biennial in 2016, as well as exhibitions and projects in Mexico and the United States. She has received support through Mexico’s PECDA program and continues to develop a practice where material, language, and ideas meet with a quiet but deliberate sense of poetry.
When Amaya arrived at El Ganzo, she already had an idea in mind: a conceptual game between language and objects, translating words into pure materials such as wood and metal. Rather than creating a figurative intervention, she imagined something more minimal—a series of poetic gestures in which the materials themselves could speak.Her approach was deeply connected to the landscape. Inspired by cinema and drawn to the expressive possibilities of burnt wood, she began working with fire as a way of introducing the idea of memory into the material. As she put it, “Nature is an act of poetry, and this is why I treat it as such.”At El Ganzo, this relationship between word and image took shape in Atardecer (Sunset), a piece whose title became part of the way the work was experienced. For Amaya, language is not simply a label; it can be a way into the work, a small clue that changes how we look at what is in front of us.But the residency did not end with Atardecer. The piece was eventually destroyed, and from its disappearance came something else: Ruina Circular, an installation of rocks arranged across a wall. What began as one intervention became another, transforming the idea of the work through absence, material, and time.In that sense, Amaya’s residency became an unexpectedly fitting meditation on memory itself: what remains, what disappears, and how one form can become the beginning of another.
