Leyla Cardenas

Multimedia artist Leyla Cardenas excavates hidden histories of human intrusion in landscapes through installations, films, and sculptures. Cardenas investigates exhibition sites and their surroundings in order to exhume layers of prior use and intervention. Neglected ruins of former structures and quarries at the fringes of urban development provide Cardenas with material testimony to the cyclically destructive effects of industrialization; they reappear in her works as spectral images on stretched, frayed fabrics or meticulously stratified cross sections of past restoration efforts. Cardenas pushes these archaeological remnants to reoccupy the collective consciousness as cultural and physical reminders of the past and clues to the futures that await contemporary civilizations.