My Safest Place by Alina Orlav

Reception & Artist talk with Alina Orlav on Friday, Sept 18th from 5pm-8pm. Drinks and snacks provided.

Within My Safest Place, we explore the mother’s body as a sacred place—an incubator, a temple-like environment—during pregnancy, birth, and infancy. Whose experience are we witnessing: the one giving life, or the one receiving it? At the center of the exhibition is the subjective perception of reproduction: what it may feel like to give life, to participate in one of the most culturally invisibilized and dangerous acts, and yet the singular form of creation essential to the continuation of humankind. The exhibition also reaches toward the perception of an infant, depicting the mother as the whole world—the way she might first be seen, felt, and experienced.

The exhibition encompasses papier-mâché sculptures and reliefs, soil installation, acrylic paintings, and original works on paper.

The drawings on display were created as conceptual foundations for other works and were never intended for exhibition. They are immediate manifestations of ideas at the moment of conception, offering viewers an intimate insight into the artist’s creative process. In contrast, the sculptures, reliefs, and paintings developed from these drawings are more balanced, minimalistic, and resolved, resembling carefully considered mandalas or symbols.

Each sculpture is unique, created by hand without molds or reproductions. Recycling household paper waste and other single-use materials, the artist builds each form slowly, layer by layer, through an intensive papier-mâché process. The sculptures incorporate soil from the ancestral homelands of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples in Denver, Colorado, where the cesarean-section sculptures originate.

The soil used in the Aurelia Gallery installation was borrowed for the duration of the exhibition from the ancestral homeland of the Pueblo peoples of the Tewa-speaking nations in Santa Fe, grounding the work within its landscape.