María Elena González

[1][10] In 2020, artist and scholar Ellen Levy wrote "González's art re-invents nature as culture" through an "exquisite attunement" that uncovers formal and thematic analogies between both realms and synesthetic connections between visual and aural senses.

"[4] Her sculptural installation Resting Spots (1999) consisted of low, wooden columnar shapes like curved drums covered with white tile The New York Times likened to a collaboration between Antonio Gaudi and Agnes Martin; suggesting seats, they served as memorial markers for her deceased parents.

[7][8][9] For the site-specific outdoor sculpture Magic Carpet/Home (1999/2003/2017)—installed in parks in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles—González painted the plans of local public-housing units onto undulating wood platforms surfaced with recycled rubber playground material.

[26] Mnemonic Architecture (Bronx Museum of Art, 2002) was a knowingly inaccurate, full-size recreation from memory of the layout of González's childhood home in Cuba using lines that vanished or came into focus depending on vantage point.

[8][1][2] Her "UN Real Estates" exhibition (Art in General, 2003) explored the transitory experience of immigrants, refugees (and artists), connecting memory, imagination, architecture and a sense of home as fluid; it employed residential floor plans embossed onto wavy concrete tiles arranged in patterns or imprinted on mat-like panels of thick, translucent rubber.

[8][5][27] The first show conveyed a mood of unease and suppressed emotional energy that centered on a fragile, ominous-looking electrical tower structure that was repeated in hand-altered photographic negatives, a small glass sculpture, and a silhouette traced on paper with fingernail clippings.

[8] The second show, titled "Internal DupliCity," presented nine minimal, blood-red architectural forms set atop white pedestals and encased in cubes of frosted plexiglass partly obscuring them that Holland Cotter characterized as "a phantom city, familiar but inaccessible, filtered through mist."

The structures—based on memories of Renaissance villas, agrarian sheds, burial vaults and churches seen during a Rome fellowship—conjured associations with Catholic reliquaries, dollhouses and longtime themes of loss and remembered or imagined homes.