2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition

For this exhibition, carolina muñoz awad presents every forty two times, one., a work that is best described as a performative laboratory for the artist and invited audience. muñoz awad has been working for the past year with collaborative performance, both guided and improvisational, studying the close interaction between performer and sandbags. These sandbags are meant to be carried, held, touched, cared for, and even talked to. The artist opens the piece to the immense possibilities and freedom of individual bodies towards the material. They might feel bodily enough, therapeutical, or just like a space to feel less alone in the city. 

The wooden framework serves as an open structure that can hold the bodies while they’re not being active and/or activated. It also responds to the artist’s own methods of inventories and grids that underlay her theoretical work. The shapes and colors of the bags respond to a primal level of this work that is constantly subject to change, as it will do in the gallery during the length of the exhibition. There will be daily guided performances by muñoz awad and whomever wants to show up and hang.

Carolina Muñoz Awad (b. Santiago, Chile) is an MFA candidate in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design/The New School and currently holds the President’s Scholarship in the program. She has been based in New York City since 2021. muñoz awad graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in architecture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in 2018. After architecture school, she worked as an architect, and then as researcher for her former university and The National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development of Chile. In 2019, she started experimenting with materials and performance, trying to respond to personal questions that architecture couldn’t resolve for her: How do we use our body in space? What does it mean to use space? And how do we perceive (our) human presence? muñoz awad has exhibited her work in Santiago, Chile; Albany, New York; and New York, NY.. She has attended the Arts Letters & Numbers Residency in upstate New York.