Altar

Amanda Linares’s installation unfolds across interconnected sections: a tiled ceramic floor with warped and lifted segments that reveal a botanical drawing on wood beneath, a concrete wall panel incorporating found and handmade objects, and a series of shadows rendered in graphite directly onto the wall. Collectively, these components form a fragmented domestic landscape in which interior and exterior, as well as past and present, coexist and intersect. Within this shifting terrain, where boundaries blur and temporal layers accumulate, subtle material transitions and measured interventions create a space where memory is directly embedded into the architecture, poised between permanence and transformation.

The geometric floor piece continues Linares’s ongoing investigation of patterns inspired by the tiled surfaces of her childhood home in Havana. Lifted sections reveal hidden botanical imagery, as if the ground itself were opening to reveal nature’s persistent return and subtle reclamation of space. The floor functions simultaneously as surface and threshold, exposing an underlying, nearly primordial presence and engaging with the interplay between visibility and concealment.

Recurring themes in Linares’s practice—belonging, memory, and identity—are articulated through her deliberate use of materials. Concrete and tile, materials associated with permanence and shelter, serve as both canvas and container, encapsulating layered personal and collective histories. Found chair splats are combined with handmade terracotta sun and moon motifs, which reference cycles of time, both earthly and cosmic, and are integrated into a wall panel that alludes to an abstract and spiritual force associated with creation. The title Altar reframes the domestic interior as a sacred site, transforming the house itself into a locus of ritual and reflection. Graphite shadows drawn directly onto the wall, reminiscent of those cast by a window or metal lattice, function as traces of an unseen presence.

Text by Laura Novoa, Independent Curator.