Estefania Velez Rodriguez | Time’s Passage is Probably an Illusion

Velez Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to the continental United States at an early age. This experience led her to feel foreign here and there, everywhere and nowhere, and to see painting as a spatial problem. For this series, she built windows that are simultaneously looking inside and outside and depict a temporal space that only exists relatively within us. She painted throughout the pandemic in her studio in Brooklyn as well as on a rooftop in Mexico City, and pondered how time’s passage is probably an illusion. 

In these ruptured landscapes, the artist questions our outsider/insider relationship with what surrounds us. She remembered the unstoppable noise of ambulances outside our windows, and the unsettling fear of the outside, of the virus, and of each other, and yet eschewed the norm to paint landscapes full of cedars, oaks, dark greens, and grey skies in preference to normalize a warmer and more expectant surrounding.