Every Number is One: a Whole in Three Parts Composed of Twenty-Four Stages of Difference or How Can We Know the Moon if We Never See its Dark Side?

A site-specific installation by MARIANA GARIBAY RAEKE
DECEMBER 11-20, 2015

This work is made up of twenty-four plaster figures cast from a single malleable mold. The figures stand atop three tables, which echo the floor plan of the gallery. The first cast is a simple polygonal form that transforms and grows with each subsequent iteration. Variations were produced by carving into the sides of the mold and shrinking its mass. The piece evolves with each new cast, growing larger and more complex, capturing the process of transformation within this singular work. Each angle provides a different experience of color, form and texture. Each figure embodies a particular stage in a process that can be traced backwards and forwards in time.  
 
The casting process is typically used to create objects nearly indistinguishable from one another. Mariana’s practice instead shows a transformation and the difference it creates as a singular work. This piece is a visual collection of distinct moments, assorted pieces of the past, that build on each other to capture slippage, growth and decay.
 
“Every number is one, since it is brought before the mind by a simple intuition and is given a name; but the unity which attaches to it is that of a sum, it covers a multiplicity of parts which can be considered separately.” — Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
 
Mariana Garibay Raeke was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and relocated to the Bay Area in her twenties.  She graduated from the California College of the Arts in 2012 with a BFA in Painting and minor in Visual Studies.  In 2014 she received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art.  She has been an artist in residence at Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the Kala Art Institute.  Her work has been exhibited at the de Young Art Center, The Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco, SFMOMA Artist Gallery and MACLA, among others.  She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.