LAURA CAMILA MEDINA // Ceremony for the Winged

On view October 11–November 23, 2025
Opening reception Saturday, October 11 (12–3 p.m.)
Visiting artist talk at PNCA Friday, October 10 (6 p.m.) RSVP

This month in the Project Room, Laura Camila Medina’s Ceremony for the Winged transforms the space into a whimsical cave of wonders. This exhibition marks the reimagining of Medina’s new animation titled busco todos los caminos que me conduzcan de nuevo a ti. Translated from the artist’s native Spanish, the phrase alludes to a homegoing journey, searching for all the paths that lead her back to an ephemeral “you.” A place, a sense of belonging, a construction of identity. Compelled by new media explorations, the artist has paved a practice that melds painting, sculpture, and video collage into wonderfully soft, pastel-colored 3D landscapes. In this manner, Medina honors dreaming and imagination as crucial components of remembering and survival, with the video works permeating the boundaries that delineate the handmade and the digital. 

Intuitive collage and stop motion animation come together to collapse time and bridge the gap between geographical distance, collective and personal memory, and the material residue of the artist’s practice. Images from Colombian and US popular culture intertwine with a poetic voiceover and field recordings composed by artist aru apaza, connecting mountainous sounds to the visuals of Andean miniature practices (ranging from Muisca Tunjos to the contemporary Chivas). Swirls and spirals repeat throughout in the way text and objects move across the work in a tender homage to the journey of summiting the Colombian mountains. This piece is projected onto a screen hand-composed of fabric scraps, digital prints, painted soft sculptures, compartments of crushed clay, and ceramic amulets. In considering the cyclical nature of memory, the collected scraps of chiffon and silk hold significant weight for the artist as they connect this new work with her first monotypes produced nearly ten years ago.

The screen’s construction inspired by a spider’s web and gossamer—a symbol often present in Medina’s sculptures and adjacent video compositions—creates tendrils of connection throughout her life while giving the immersive installation the appearance of emerging from a third space beyond the screen. By way of magical realism and the creation of the enchanting internal landscape—a site where memories are in a state of constant reconstruction—Medina continues to foster a sense of belonging and perpetuity amidst displacement.

Laura Camila Medina (1995) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia. Her practice is deeply inspired by the kisses between mountains and sky of her birthplace intertwined with the thematic fantasy-scape and migrant microcosms of Central Florida. Her work has been exhibited at The Luminary, The Sculpture Center, Yossi Milo, David Castillo Gallery, SPURS, Arts Fort Worth, Fuller Rosen Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, and Nationale. She was recently awarded the SPACES Satellite Fund, the H. Lee Hirsche Memorial Prize, Dean’s Travel Grant, and CCAM Fellowship at Yale University, Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, New Media Fellowship at Open Signal, and various artist residencies including the Living School of Art, ACRE, Signal Fire, and Centrum. She is represented by Nationale in Portland, OR. Medina earned her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and an MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University. She is currently based in Cleveland, OH, where she is the AICAD Post-Graduate Fellow at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

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