Blanca Estela uses a variety of mediums ranging from photography, film and installation through integrating various technologies. In her newest body of work, She explores the shifting relationship between light, shape, perception and its effect on representation and illusion by manipulating acrylic glass. Blanca Estela creates metaphorical spaces that reductively explore the illusion of a stable reality. The limitless shifts in perception based on light, shape, and proximity mimic the complex interplay of intention and reception in cross cultural communication, understanding, and experience.
In her work shapes appear to bend as reflections confuse boundaries, and shadows complicate the core structures of each sculpture. The instability of a fixed identity enhances these works, and mirror her ever evolving identity; enriched by each country I have inhabited, and received differently dependent upon time, place, cultural and linguistic nuance. The shifting beauty is both structural and atmospheric, projections and preconceptions, real and imagined facts, play tricks on the mind and color the experience.
Blanca Estela came to this type of three dimensional work by way of art photography. In intimate portraits of immigrant women, she was trying, by a different type of light, lens, and shape manipulation, to express the multilayered identities of these women, and the richness of their forgotten or erased identities. She used digital media to break down the structure of the portraits into the most simple lines of the face. The line drawings were projected and made into dimensional sculptural installations meticulously rendered first in thread, and later in glowing EL wire. The EL wire works were created in Plexiglas structures, which began her inquiry into this media.