Artist Claudia Vieira: Tracing the Connection

Talking to Strangers (About Music)

Since I've known her, Brazilian artist Claudia Vieira has played with lines. Drawing them, using tape to make them, on walls and floors and various surfaces. Her line is continuous, spiraled, repetitive. It is an immersion, a self-reflective cathartic, healing experience of the crossing of space and time, both for the artist and the viewer/participant. Her creations are trance-like journeys, meditations that connect one place to another, one time to another, the world to itself.
She and I have not been strangers for a long while, since the first time I encountered her years back and was amazed to watch the way she moved in the world and how she created new worlds with her work, strange fascinating ones. I have asked her and she has obliged to help children create their own worlds too, with their bodies and their imaginations.
"I refer to life as just the lines, I use my body to do the work," Claudia says in our chat. "It is basically a determined movement, a prayer, a ritual, an exercise..."
Rituals are important.
Claudia Vieira's upcoming solo show, Double Trace, at Praxis Gallery, starts January 9th.
It is the continuation of work begun nearly two decades ago.
"It will complete a cycle for me, in a metaphoric biographical way," she says.
Double Trace Solo Show, A Live Drawing,
a continuous performance til March 7th
Praxis Gallery
501 W. 20th St., NYC