Miruna-Maria Stanciu
she/her
Romanian, 2003
mirunamariastanciu.cargo.site & @mirunamariastanciu
Thesis: Almost Equal To
By defining abstraction as both a cognitive and material process, I research various operations meant to flatten a continuous, distributed environment into human-scale proximity.
To work with this tension, my focus turns towards the property of being synthetic, signalling an opaque yet heterogeneous surface, with no explicit connection to its origin.
In the room, equally staged objects and text run side by side, each attempting to frame the other. Still, like all parallel lines, they will always fall just short of intersecting.
My graduation work is a collection of minimalistic gestures on various polymers, composites and alloys, with an emphasis on materials that contradict natural rhythms through engineering, such as memory foam or galvanized steel, as well as materials developed into parodies of their more valuable, intricate counterparts; plexiglass, MDF.
Using a predefined text format and the context of the exhibition itself, I am interested in parallelism and translations performed in real time, as objects get paired up with their adjacent specification and start to mirror each other to the point of both redundancy and revelation.
This project, alongside my thesis, explores the claim that we navigate everyday life mostly surrounded by symbols or stand-ins for a distant, more genuine material reality. Relying on various degrees of abstraction, from language, image and drawing to computation or industrial manufacture, we actively participate in (re)producing a world with little awareness of what gets filtered, distorted or even completely overwritten.
