San Miguel

In San Miguel, Maureen Muse transforms natural light into both raw material and radical gesture. The work is nothing less than the silent choreography of light entering through three windows and a door, shifting across the gallery’s empty space throughout the day. It is a cinema without film, an image in flight. On the second floor, the form and scale of the garage curtain reappear. Yet here they neither hang nor divide; instead, they rest on the ground, rendered in earth and mud collected from the garden. This replicated image is not a copy but a transposition—one that transforms the familiar into a tangible, corporeal presence. The soil imparts weight, texture, and gravity to the form, inviting a more intimate, sensorial encounter with the architecture and memory of the site. The exhibition thus unfolds as a correspondence between the ethereal and the earthly, between what enters and what remains, what escapes and what takes root. On the ground floor, natural light enters, moves, and vanishes, producing an image choreographed by time; on the upper floor, soil settles and endures, producing an image that occupies and bears weight. The two works respond to one another: light pierces, soil sustains; the image flees, the form holds. In this poetic confrontation, a tension emerges between the animate and the inert, the celestial and the domestic, protection and revelation—like the figure of San Miguel (Saint Michael), who in many traditions stands as a defender against darkness, a warrior light that slips through and resists possession, while at the same time a material presence that endures. Together, these images—one aerial, the other terrestrial—teach us to perceive what has always been there, and to recognize within the everyday other, latent powers. Marco Valtierra