THIRD BORN champions art that redefines negative space—not as emptiness, but as a site of potential and transformation. This vision invites viewers to reconsider the frameworks of art history and our lived environments. As a cultural bridge between New York and Mexico City, THIRD BORN facilitates meaningful exchanges among artists, curators, and audiences, fostering a dialogue that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.
THIRD BORN is pleased to participate in MEGA Art Fair, bringing together the work of Anna de Castro Barbosa and Marissa Delano. Both practices stand in conversation, bridged by an acute sensitivity to materiality and the tensions that arise between the intimate, the hidden, and the exposed. Between their work unfolds a sensory world where looking provokes bodily sensations and emotions.
Anna de Castro Barbosa’s practice engages with multisensory environments, immersing viewers in haptic images, scent, and visceral materials. Drawing from horror cinema, botany, medicine, entomology, and archaeology, Barbosa constructs works that challenge bodily perception. Hypersomnia, 2024, acts as an ode to living matter –its leathery encasing juxtaposed with metal– alluding to the malleability of skin while also exploring the potential for metamorphosis. Its organic
yet clinical form evokes the medical material vocabulary, recalling instruments designed for bodily intervention– both protective and invasive. In Speculum XI, 2024, marbles hang delicately in a state of precarious equilibrium, their weight and suspension reinforcing a fragile tension. The contrast between the smooth, cold touch of glass and the sharp, reflective surface of stainless steel (inox) enhances the work’s evocative potential– where tactility, light, and form intertwine to produce a sensation oscillating between comfort and unease. The materials push and pull against each other, intensifying the tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and rejection.
Marissa Delano’s presentation of photographs exposes the ways in which, by layering contexts – including references to pornography and gender performativity – she interrogates societal taboos and the voyeuristic impulses underpinning contemporary image culture. Self-Portrait in Bed, Argyle St., 2010/2024, exemplifies this tension, seemingly depicting the artist in a state of vulnerability to onlookers. Her compositions produce a visual push and pull – a dynamic interplay of attraction, drawing the viewer in while maintaining a sense of distance. This tension encourages reflection on the nature of engagement and act of looking. Through framing and subtle obfuscation, Delano gestures toward forms of unseen labor and intimacy, where private and public spheres blur. Her totem GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS stacks imagery into an almost anthropomorphic structure, embodying the physical architecture of strip clubs and the layered personas within them.
Together, Barbosa and Delano construct a charged environment where sensuality and discomfort collide. Their works engage the body –both physically and psychologically– unraveling the interplay between attraction and resistance, revelation and concealment. At MEGA, audiences are drawn into this delicate yet charged terrain, where perception is unsettled, and the familiar is constantly reconfigured.
