Mónica Mays – Engine, 2025

Part insect, part machine, Engine is assembled from salvaged automobile exhaust systems, carved wooden banister elements and other objects drawn from homes and garages. The exhaust pipes become elongated limbs while retaining the traces of burnt oil from combustion. Suspended by steel cables, the sculpture seems poised between propulsion and collapse, desire and depletion. Mónica Mays notes that in Spanish an exhaust system is called a tubo de escape, bringing exhaustion and escape into unexpected linguistic proximity. Reworking the hidden organs of the combustion engine, the sculpture brings together the formal, linguistic and symbolic dimensions of the exhaust system. Exhaustion and escape become two inseparable aspects of the same machine.

Mónica Mays’ sculptures are composed through the assemblage of industrial debris, domestic remnants, and organic and natural materials. The artist situates her practice within a baroque logic, in which exuberance becomes a mode of exploring the economies, symbols, and functions inherent to each of the assembled components, giving rise to domestic landscapes that are at once familiar and strange. The materials she selects point to histories of the exploitation of bodies and the commodification of nature.