ARTIST STATEMENT

Infused in Latin America’s magic realism, my drawings, installations and videos explore diverse artifacts, discoveries and natural phenomena, engaging narratives of identity, memory, displacement and ecology. My current explorations focus on bodily and existential vulnerability through the lens of plant specimens imperiled by a material world that offers diminishing support and increased dependency on humans. Balancing the naturally fluid and chaotic behavior of water and ink against my deliberate mark-making, my works are records of a process, a symbiosis, a transformation, a story still unfolding.

Irene Pantelis is a Bolivian-Uruguayan-American artist based in the Washington D.C.-Baltimore region. She works primarily in the areas of drawing, installation and animation. Initially a labor lawyer and self-taught painter, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts and a Master in Fine Arts from the University of Maryland at College Park. Her work is held in private and public collections, such as those of the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and the Mattie Kelley Arts Center in Florida. Derived from her drawing process, her experimental short animations have been screened worldwide, receiving, among other honors, an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Awards in France.

Irene's website