Multimedia artist Estelle Maisonett began her collection of found objects in 2012. She investigated how discarded items encountered around her home in the Bronx could be evidence of a population, a culture, and a moment in time. In combination with her prints and photographs, these found objects became the basis for Maisonett’s life-size collages that pay homage to her life in New York and her family history in Puerto Rico and Mexico. “All my works are constantly building a home in some way,” she said. 

Tracing Roots (2022), for example, depicts Maisonett’s parents embracing on a crushed velvet sofa. Every detail of the work points to the artist’s heritage and New York upbringing. Her father is identified by a “Yale Dad” hat with the Y transformed into the Yankee’s logo; faux bricks often used as cheap improvements to rented apartments line the back wall; a photograph of her mother’s hand emerges from a bunched golden sweatshirt to clasp her father’s arm. Although her parents’ figures are abstracted and the room is simply sketched, Maisonett’s trompe l'oeil hints at fully formed individuals and a well loved apartment existing beyond the panel. “I think about drawing a lot,” she said of her object paintings, “drawing creates sort of a false space - also photography as well - but there’s a sense of it being real.” 

For Maisonett, the biggest difference between New York and Miami was the sunlight and access to nature. “Being in Fountainhead, in Miami, I was thinking a lot about light,” she said. “I sort of had this obsession with the shadow and with reflection [...] I ended up working with mirrors.” Maisonett’s hand-cut mirrors hold image transfers of notable people in her life, including her grandmother and Puerto Rican intellectual Pedro Albizu Campos. The delicate mirror portraits dangle at the end of thick metal chains (sourced from Fountainhead’s backyard). Draped across the wall, they are reminiscent of a sharp, shimmering locket or dog tag, both of which inspired the work. In her collages and new sculptural work, Maisonett builds intimate, familiar spaces that belie the layers of complex, difficult history existing just beneath the surface.